We invest in leaders and empower them to improve the world with design.
San Francisco
Joined March 2011
- Tweets1.8K
- Following857
- Followers26.8K
- Likes3.6K
Designer Fund retweeted
Ha - 1. great way to get twitter engagement and 2. list is already improving - @ambrook, @paper, @interfere_, @framer should be higher. Love having 3 @designerfund companies in the top 10 @linear, @stripe, @NotionHQ ;)
Travel planning is getting a serious upgrade.
Congrats to @FDavidsonT and team on launching @OdessiaTravel today! From researching and ranking hundreds of thousands of hotels to finding better rates, perks, and smarter itineraries, Odessia brings a new level of thoughtfulness to planning travel.
We're excited to see it out in the world: odessia.com
Designer Fund retweeted
Announcing the beta release of the Pi API. We’ve partnered with companies across diverse industries to adapt our models to their robots and applications, from harvesting strawberries to assembling servers. Now we’re opening access to more teams.
Shipping code continues to get faster, but production debugging often takes hours of digging through logs, traces, and replays. @interfere_ helps teams understand what’s going wrong in their software, who it affects, and how to fix it.
We’re excited to back @lukeshiels and the Interfere team in their seed round, led by @HummingbirdVC.
Luke built Interfere because he wanted to spend more time building products and less time keeping them running. He took time on the product’s foundations despite advice to launch quickly. His approach to engineering: “Remove, simplify, improve, in that order.”
In our latest Designer Founders conversation, Luke shares the decisions behind Interfere, why he hires people who care about what they put their name to, and why every new hire gets a physical letter from him: designerfounders.substack.co…
Excited to announce we've raised a $5.1M seed round at @interfere_ led by Hummingbird, with Worldbuild, Designer Fund, YC, Vercel, and others.
In an age where execution is abundant, we’re building Interfere to enable the next generation of software to be exceptional from day one.
Designer Fund retweeted
Some argue about whether you should email monthly updates or not as a founder.
@ambrook says: how about instead we mail them in a personal letter alongside a book we created?
This company is different…
Designer Fund retweeted
one thing i learned during my time @AnthropicAI was to always question and reinvent the way you work. and when your tools don’t fit anymore, build your own tools.
a lotta wisdom from a lotta good folks here ☁️
“Is this worth my time? Does this bring me productivity, joy, or calm? I think these are the questions design has always helped answer.”
Thank you to @joellewenstein and the @AnthropicAI design team for opening up about how you work, the challenges you face, and how you see the role of design evolving on product teams.
Our latest AI in Design case study with Anthropic below!
00:00 Design at AI speed
01:43 The precursor to Claude Design
03:28 From user researcher to builder
05:09 Treating code as clay
08:09 A new rhythm for collaboration
09:22 What’s worth building
Designer Fund retweeted
Today @airHQ becomes an agent that can run all your creative tasks for you.
You make the work. Air handles the rest.
At @AnthropicAI, designers aren’t just adapting to faster software development. They’re building the tools that shape it.
Every designer ships code in their first week. @nateparrott's prototyping tool became the precursor to Claude Design. And the team has reshaped critiques around live demos to keep pace with faster cycles.
But faster execution makes the question @joellewenstein asks even more important: “The question isn’t just, can we make it? It’s is this worth making at all?”
Full case study: designerfund.substack.com/p/…
Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/5E8n3CItlHM
“Is this worth my time? Does this bring me productivity, joy, or calm? I think these are the questions design has always helped answer.”
Thank you to @joellewenstein and the @AnthropicAI design team for opening up about how you work, the challenges you face, and how you see the role of design evolving on product teams.
Our latest AI in Design case study with Anthropic below!
00:00 Design at AI speed
01:43 The precursor to Claude Design
03:28 From user researcher to builder
05:09 Treating code as clay
08:09 A new rhythm for collaboration
09:22 What’s worth building
Designer Fund retweeted
“Is this worth my time? Does this bring me productivity, joy, or calm? I think these are the questions design has always helped answer.”
Thank you to @joellewenstein and the @AnthropicAI design team for opening up about how you work, the challenges you face, and how you see the role of design evolving on product teams.
Our latest AI in Design case study with Anthropic below!
00:00 Design at AI speed
01:43 The precursor to Claude Design
03:28 From user researcher to builder
05:09 Treating code as clay
08:09 A new rhythm for collaboration
09:22 What’s worth building
Designer Fund retweeted
nyc friends - join me (@designerfund) + @gurunandinisays (Headline) tomorrow morning for matcha + a conversation on Designing What Matters in the age of AI.
Wednesday, 8-9:30am RSVP for details (our favorite matcha...). would love to see you there...
luma.com/k3pu6drw
Sales is a team sport. @operate_gtm brings people, agents, and tools into one workspace to keep deals moving. Built by a design-obsessed team, with the craft to prove it.
Congrats to @moeamaya @DanielKnisley and team on the launch! operate.so
So excited to share the latest version of Operate
We spent 18 months building a high-craft CRM and realized that wasn’t it. In a world of agents, the sales tool of record had to be rethought from the ground up.
· Long running durable agents: one per deal, one watching pipeline, and more. Specialized to your business, product, and competitive market.
· Collaborative with agents, people, and tools: Sales is a team game, and single-player Claude isn’t working.
· AI-native connectors: Bespoke MCP gateway for sales tools everyone uses like Outreach, Gong/Granola, CRMs, etc. Plus the ability to add that one-off tool that every team has.
· Memory as a first class consideration - Structured data is necessary but incomplete. Keep that in a CRM or data warehouse but let the nature of sales context flow freely.
· Traceability - data hygiene is already a problem. Ensure ops can observe agent changes, evals, tool calls, etc.
· Fire UI - Wrap it all up in the nicest GTM tool UI possible
We pivoted 8 weeks ago but spent the last decade preparing for this moment. We deeply believe in this future and we’re just got started.
Designer Fund retweeted
the PaperTexture shader has been rebuilt from scratch!
what’s new:
- a new pattern with straight fold lines
- a new angle prop to control shadow direction (combine it with seed for endless randomness)
- roughnessSize to control the grain size
- roughnessRows to arrange the grain into laid-paper stripes
- manual blending control over how the image mixes with the paper texture
- manual control over image distortion
- texture clipping via the image’s alpha channel
the roughness, fiber, drops, wrinkles, and crumples patterns are all still here, rebuilt for a more realistic look and better performance
shader docs: shaders.paper.design/paper-t…
full list of changes: github.com/paper-design/shad…
Designer Fund retweeted
We believe that software doesn’t close deals. You do.
Excited to introduce Operate, the collaborative AI tool built for frontier sales teams.
TLDR; Rethought from the ground up, we connect your whole sales stack (CRM, calls, inbox, and more) to surface where every deal stands and what’s next.
Sales leaders get a forecast they trust and don’t have to DM their reps on Slack for status updates and data hygiene issues. Sales reps can stay out of the CRM and the tedious toil of admin.
We’re working with growing sales teams (3-50 reps) on making AI actually effective for sales including mapping the pipeline, routing to agents/deterministic paths, implementing real workflows, and tracking goal progress.
If this resonates, sign up to the waitlist. If you are a good fit, the form will redirect so you can schedule a chat with one of our co-founders.
Designer Fund retweeted
really feels like brand design is having a moment. seeing a wave of brand roles opening up across our portfolio right now:
@linear: design engineer, web & brand (remote north america/europe)
jobs.ashbyhq.com/Linear/f04f…
@ambrook: brand designer (nyc/sf/denver/remote; up to $195k)
jobs.ashbyhq.com/ambrook/9a7…
@notionhq: brand designer, creative studio (nyc; up to $250k)
jobs.ashbyhq.com/notion/59f2…
@stripe: senior brand designer, link (remote US; up to $239k)
stripe.com/careers/listing/s…
@gustohq: staff brand & motion designer (sf/nyc/denver; up to $222k)
job-boards.greenhouse.io/gus…
@bezihq: motion designer & video editor (remote north america)
bezi.com/careers/motion-desi…
more roles: jobs.designerfund.com
Designer Fund retweeted
We're hiring a Product Design Lead at @BeziHQ !
Bezi is building the best agentic workspace for game devs & studios. You'd be owning big parts of the product, join a team that cares a lot about design quality, and do much of your communicating through prototypes instead of decks and static mockups.
If this sounds like you, apply below 👇
bezi.com/careers/product-des…
Designer Fund retweeted
There’s a good chance your open source model is costing more than the frontier.
Cheap tokens ≠ cheap tasks.
Here, we introduce Intelligence Density, and Density Aware Training, our post-training technique to achieve less wasted compute, better learning, all with no knobs to tune.
Enabled by default in every Trajectory model.
Designer Fund retweeted
Routing is now built in to the @linear coding agent. It can automatically pick the right the model (Claude/Codex/Open source/more soon) for the task.
The Switzerland of coding agents
Designer Fund retweeted
The startup tool stack is growing/shifting every month. We asked founders that value design what they use for data, marketing, design, engineering, infra, finance, etc. Basically if you were starting from zero today what tools do you turn to?
While we do this for our founders I figure this can also be useful to anyone starting something today so here’s a public version of the recommendations - startuptoolstack.netlify.app…
Also, any mission critical tools you use we missed??
Designer Fund retweeted
New @ThePeelPod with @tomerlondon
We talk everything he’s learned scaling @GustoHQ zero to 500k customers and $1B+ in TTM revenue, being obsessed with your customer, what their internal data says about AI’s impact on SMBs, and Gusto’s M&A playbook.
Full episode here + links below.
0:00 You must be obsessed with your customers
10:09 Building Gusto Cofounder in 8 weeks
13:57 What AI is actually doing to small businesses
19:52 COVID and "the end of small business"
27:42 Why running a small business is so hard
32:21 SVB and why payroll can't be late
36:29 How GTM changes after 500,000 customers
39:27 Running payroll manually before Gusto
46:19 Why payroll and compliance are so hard
49:14 What his dad's clothing store taught him
54:01 Are we regulating small business out of existence?
58:14 Starting as ZenPayroll in 2012
1:05:03 Getting the first customers
1:07:30 Minimum Lovable Product vs MVP
1:11:29 How AI changed the way Gusto builds
1:15:59 Gusto's M&A playbook
1:22:53 Shimon Peres and "no room for small dreams"