Each week, I talk with founders, investors, and founding designers about the decisions that shape the hunt for product–market fit: when to bring design in, what to look for in a great founding designer, and how design helps you earn traction (not just attention) by getting what you’re building into the hands of customers faster.
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-ubiquitous in-app messenger, and eventually a company that reshaped how startups communicate with customers.
We talk about what it really takes to get from “this seems cool” to “this is working”. How they used their existing network to get early traction, why direct, human outreach still beats automated growth theatre, and what made the early pitch of “talking to your customers inside the product”, so compelling that people immediately wanted in.
Then we fast-forward to the second act. Des shares what it’s like when a new platform shift forces you to re-think your product strategy in public. We talk about the internal debate that led Intercom to go all-in on AI, how the team navigated the risk of a major pivot, and what founders often underestimate when they try to ship AI features into a product that already has paying customers and a reputation to protect.
It’s a candid conversation about the messy sequencing of product, story, distribution, and belief, and how to spot the signals that you’ve found a real wedge, and when you need to reinvent it.
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 talk about the scrappy reality behind the sprint. Not “a workshop”, but a pressure-tested way to cut through endless debate, force clarity, and end the week with something you can put in front of real people. They share what it was like parachuting into fast-moving startups at GV, helping teams go from a messy problem to a prototype and honest feedback in days, and why that pace changes the quality of decisions you make.
We also get into what they’re doing now with Character, including Character Labs, and why they believe the same decision-making discipline matters just as much at the investing stage as it does inside the product team.
If you’re pre-PMF, stuck in opinion loops, or trying to find a reliable way to turn uncertainty into momentum, this one is full of practical signal.
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 looks like when it’s done well. Kate describes it as a little like being an agency that gets invited in, except the incentives are completely different. She isn’t selling hours. She’s there to help founders make progress on the things that are hard to see from the inside, and hard to talk about when the stakes are high.
Kate shares what she tends to notice across companies, especially the gap between what gets reported and what’s really happening. Team dynamics, organisational friction, and the subtle ways a product story can drift until nobody can explain it simply anymore. We also touch on why brand is starting to matter more again, and what she’s seeing from teams who get it right early.
If you’re building a startup and want a more honest view of what “help” can look like beyond generic advice, this episode is a rare look behind the curtain.