The Design VC

In this episode of The Design VC , Andy Budd sits down with Simon Rohrbach, founder and CEO of Plain, a customer support platform built for modern B2B teams. Andy first met Simon years ago when Simon was leading design at Deliveroo, so this felt less like a formal interview and more like a long overdue catch-up with someone who’s gone on a seriously interesting journey. Simon is one of the best ex...

In this episode of The Design VC , Andy Budd sits down with Luke Wroblewski, one of the early pioneers of UX and interaction design, now Managing Director and Head of Product at Sutter Hill Ventures. Luke’s led design at Yahoo and Google, founded two startups that were acquired by Twitter and Google (Bag Check and Polar), and today works hands-on with companies from the earliest “blank page” stage...

Irene Au is one of those rare people who helped shape modern product design from the inside, then took those lessons into venture. In this episode of The Design VC , Andy Budd sits down with Irene, who was Yahoo’s first interaction designer, went on to help scale design at Google, and later became a partner at Khosla Ventures. We talk about what it’s really like being “design #1”, how you build cr...

It might surprise some listeners to hear that, as a VC, I spend a lot of my time encouraging founders to think twice before taking traditional VC money. Not because VC is “bad”, but because it comes with a very specific deal. Most VC funds are built to chase unicorn outcomes, and only a small number of startups can realistically deliver that. Meanwhile, plenty of founders would be better served bu...

In this episode of The Design VC , Andy Budd sits down with his old friend Marty Ringlein for one of those conversations that’s equal parts entertaining and genuinely useful. Marty has a rare career arc. He started by building an agency, nclud , that ended up being acquired by Twitter. He then founded an events company, nvite, that was acquired by Eventbrite. Along the way he turned angel investin...

In this episode of The Design VC, Andy Budd sits down with Jeff, one of the founders of Adaptive Path, co-founder of MeasureMap (acquired by Google), founder of Typekit (which went on to become part of Adobe Creative Cloud), and later a Partner at True Ventures (where he was working when we recorded). We talk about Jeff’s move from designer to founder, and what it’s actually like raising money whe...

Most weeks, as a VC, I’m talking to founders who want to build huge, global, venture-scale companies. So this conversation with Jessica Hische was a breath of fresh air. Jessica is one of the most recognised names in modern graphic design, illustration, and lettering — known for work that ranges from book covers and rebrands through to designing the titles for some well-known Wes Anderson films. S...

In this episode of The Design VC , Andy Budd talks with Ben Blumenrose, co-founder and managing partner of Designer Fund, about what it really looks like when design becomes the organising principle, not the garnish. Ben takes us back to the early Facebook years, when design was scarce, prized, and oddly powerful. He shares the behind-the-scenes reality that surprises most people: a tiny design te...

In this week’s episode of The Design VC , Andy Budd sits down with Sam Stevenson , designer-turned co-founder of Granola , “the AI notepad built for people in back-to-back meetings.” Granola didn’t launch into an empty market. It launched into a red ocean of AI note-taking and meeting summary apps, and still managed to break out. Sam shares where the idea came from, what he noticed that others mis...

A lot of early-stage problems don’t look like “design problems” at first. They look like confusion. Misalignment. A story that isn’t landing. A team shipping hard but not getting traction. In this episode I’m joined by Kate Aronowitz , a design and product leader who’s worked at eBay, LinkedIn, and Facebook , and now supports founders from inside GV . We talk about what portfolio support actually...

Most startups don’t fail because the team can’t build. They fail because they can’t decide what to build, and they waste months proving it the slow way. In this episode I’m joined by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky , best known for popularising and codifying the Design Sprint process through their work at Google Ventures , and subsequently their books Sprint , Make Time , and most recently Click . We...

Intercom didn’t start as Intercom. In this first episode of The Design VC , Des Traynor takes us back to the scrappy days of running a design consultancy with a side project, and the moment a tiny in-app message, a speech bubble popping out of a star in the corner of the UI, hinted at something bigger than the product it was built for. That small interaction became the seed of Intercom’s now-ubiqu...