Design Literacy

Often, we see this brilliance in early versions of products—born from founder-built brute force and passion—only to see it fade with scale. Ultimately, you are only as good as your team, so you better craft it intentionally and with heart. The company becomes your great work. The best designed of these organizations become durable as they scale and... See more

Product success will largely be determined by intention and vision—before anything is built, before AI or humans begin creation. As engineering becomes focused on pushing the AI frontier, design's role shifts to making these powerful but complex tools intuitive, accessible, and desired. Just as users choose products for their value rather than thei... See more

Design as curiosity

Design as literacy

But at the time, I questioned this approach. Why study semiotics when I could be building a portfolio site? Why pull all-nighters just to endure brutal critiques—tossing the work away and starting over? But the process—thinking, making, critique—proved transformative. The school wasn’t teaching design as ornamentation or styling. Instead, it was an... See more

Startups are the ideal canvas for applying design literacy. They require continuous iteration, not static perfection, in order to succeed. They are not timeless; they exist and succeed in their moment alone. They cannot rely on distribution or incumbency, only original thinking, relentless iteration and, for those persistent enough, transformative ... See more

My father’s single-minded attention to both detail and experience mirrors the approach of the best founders I’ve worked with.

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility 1935

The winning path is clear: design literacy as a cultivated mindset, not another acquired skill—embedded in every role from engineering to sales. Teams that embrace this will take risks to build cultures where authentic expression outweighs safe choices, conviction beats consensus, and craft is prioritized more than algorithmic smoothness. This does... See more