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Ben Blumenfeld

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24
first
2017-02-22
most recent
2017-02-22
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1
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podcast

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  1. “So, there's a company called Hustle that we recently backed, so they improve the outreach advocacy process by it's something like 30 or 40x. And so basically they allow one-to-one text messaging for advocacy groups. So a good example is like, let's take like Planned Parenthood. If they're trying to reach a lot of their constituents, it used to be you either send an email blast, which we know most people don't read, or you do phone phone banking, which takes forever, right? It just takes a long, long time. They've built a tool where someone can one-to-one text message, folks, could do a few hundred people in a matter of like an hour, something that would take you days in phone banking. So one of the things that we look for when we're investing is something not just 20% better, 30% better, but it's something 3000% better. And so you see a product like that and you say, okay, this is kind of a game changer. And sure enough, in the election on”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I guess it's cliche, but Joe and Brian at Airbnb, right? Airbnb is by no means a perfect company, but the way that they've instilled design in every aspect of that company and the risks that they've taken and put that company in a position to just be one of the great companies of the last 10, 20 years is amazing. And then kind of the new one, and over time I've really come to admire what evidence Snapchat are doing because I think they're a very non-Silicon Valley approach to company building. They just do things that are fun and wacky and silly, you know, things that like you rarely see Silicon Valley firms do, right? companies do they tend to be very rational and logical and growth oriented and metric oriented and snapchat just think they seem to just do things just cuz it's like we're doing just because we can and I think there's something to that I think a lot of Silicon Valley come”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “So, there's one I've really started liking Charles Hudson, has a really great newsletter, and his tone is super honest and conversational. And it makes you realize just how rare that is, how often people communicate to you in a really natural way. And then the other two that I really like social capital has their snippets. And I think snippets is actually underselling it. It's a great weekly collection of their thoughts. And then first round has just wonderful content. I think they're probably one of the best in class in terms of creating valuable content for founders.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I was thinking about this, and actually when I considered what's something I believe that others don't, I'm Jewish and have recently engaged more with local Jewish community here in San Francisco. And one of the things that I think not many folks in tech, there are not many religious folks in the tech community. They tend to be agnostic or atheists. And being Jewish, you know, it's a great way of creating ritual and connecting with heritage for me. And actually think religion can be a great way to do that. And I think it's a big reason why you see a lot of people now kind of flocking to things like Burning Man and other spiritual forms. Once you remove religion, all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, wait a second. Where do I get? It did serve a purpose for many folks so that when you removed it, it's like, well, I need to find that somewhere else. So I think one of the things I believe is that religion can still, when done right, play.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So my favorite book, there's a book called The Power of One, which is a coming of age story about a kid and his adventures. And it simply sucker for coming of age stories, a total sucker for kind of the hero's journey. And this is a beautifully written book. It was actually written by an advertised guy who worked for an advertising agency. And it's a phenomenal tale and great storytelling, and it's one of my favorites still to this day.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Fast decisions for you. We'll invest it around in a few days in terms of an investment decision. And then when you have a big inflection point, call us and we'll make an intro or whatever. But beyond that, don't expect too much. But we also won't meddle in your company. We'll let you build what you want to build. And that's a great, you know, that could be in terms of if you're an investor that wants to work that way and if you're a founder, those kind of investors can be great to have around the table too. But I think as founders, founders need to consider who they want around the table and how they want to work. And then for an investor, this is a long, long game, right? You have to be a fund is a 10-year commitment. And so I think it's really important for investors to make sure that they are doing it in a way that aligns with how they want to work.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Depth over breadth, kind of early stage investor. And so we only do about 10 to 12 investments a year. And so we're not trying to do 40, 50 investments a year for us. Every founder we back for us is really like we're thinking like, do we want to be with this person for the next 10 years? Do we believe this product should exist? Do we want to go to bat for this person and make sure that when a designer says, okay, well, which of your portfolio companies should I work at? Like we should be able to say like you should work at any one of them would be an amazing place for you to work. That's the place we want to get to. And so by having that kind of value, then it allows us to continue to go deep with our companies. And I think also it's important to as an investor to think about, well, what kind of relationship do you want with the companies that you back? Like not every investor needs to be a roll up the sleeves kind of investor. So I think there's some great investors who basically say, look, we make.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's not because one of the great things that we've done is build programs that scale and so bridge allows us to scale our support in a way that offers deep, deep help to our companies over time in a really sustainable fashion. We've also built another program called Designer Founder Guild, which is a program where we bring great designer founders in our portfolio, but also ones outside of our portfolio together on a regular basis, and they exchange best practices and knowledge. We knew that the portfolio would scale and that we'd have to scale with it. So we already put in programs in place that could scale with the portfolio. Now, I think in two, three years, we're going to need to continue to expand and put in place those kind of structures, but we're always thinking that far ahead. And I think the other great thing is for us, we are, we talk about being a”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “One of your companies and say, Hey, you know, if you did XYZ, I think this would be much better. And the founder could be like, Well, yeah, I don't agree, and they don't do it. And then you don't have the control. But as a builder, I'm always like, okay, well, this isn't perfect with this company. Well, I'll help them fix that. But really, the reality is oftentimes you might not be able to. And so you really need to make a decision when investing, assuming that you're not going to be able to kind of work day in, day out and help them build the product. Do you still believe that they can get there, right? With you as a mentor, coach, not you as a designer. And so I think that's something that for me personally, coming from that world, I've had to adjust to.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Harder so they would love to have investors that could help with this. Very few investors focus on this. It's a very specific skill set and knowledge and community that most investors aren't tied into. And so we already knew that a lot of the needs were there. We already knew we already built the relationship. So we actually, in terms of surprises, I think did a good job of minimizing those. In terms of challenges, I would say one of the things, at least for me personally, coming from Facebook where when I saw an issue, I would just build a product or work with the team to fix it, right? So as a builder, your first instinct is like, oh, well, this isn't working so well. I'll design something and help make it better as an investor. You can't really do that, right? It's more of a managerial role. It's more of a coach. It's more of a mentor. And so you can see something that's not working.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The way that we minimize the surprises around this is we actually modeled our activities for a couple years before we raised our fund. And so we, you know, both Enrique Enrique had worked in Venture for a few years, right? And then for me, we were doing angel investing and modeling the behavior of the things that we wanted to do for a couple years. So it wasn't like we just said, woke up one day and just said, oh, we'll just raise a fund. For two years, we kind of were in the ecosystem and said, if you had a great design partner as an investor, would that be interesting to you? And we went to founders with this. We went to big VCs and said, hey, if you had a co-investor in your companies that could help your companies build great products and help you hire great designers with that be interesting and all of these are like, this would be amazing to have a collaborative investor that could do this alongside us. For larger companies, they all, you know, as they scale design, it gets harder.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “16 weeks join with a cohort of other individuals, with a coach, and go through that program, then basically they can get you off the path to diabetes. And so they put that program online and they've actually seen better efficacy for that than the brick and mortar program. For companies that pay their own healthcare, paying for employees who are at risk of diabetes to go through the program can be a huge financial win for those companies. And if the product does well, then”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think definitely there's a gradiation, right? Everything is a gradiation there. I think also there are so many different layers of consideration when you think about is a product achieving its goal? So great products, they probably have different goals, right? There's business goals. There are goals for the end consumer. There are goals for society, right? Ideally, all those things are aligning beautifully where if a business does well and if the product does well, then people get what they want out of the product and actually the output is a better society. But not many companies have all those things aligned. I'll like a great example from the designer fund portfolio. We have a company called Omada Health, which is a diabetes prevention platform. And what they've done is they've built a product that mimics landmark research that shows that there was a program that if you”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think Tesla is another great example, right? It's like the technology in Tesla vehicles is amazing, but also the design of the product and the way it works and even just the aesthetics make it something that's best in class.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, no, they absolutely should go hand in hand. And I think the best companies are where those two things do come together where you kind of have this deep technology. You know, even I'll take Facebook as an example, right? Their news feed algorithm is amazing tech, right? However, if it's not married with a great user experience or if it's not being considered as the purpose of this thing, what is the type of society that we want to create? I think just having a great AI is not going to be enough. You need to actually like also marry that with great research, great product design, make it useful, and you've seen companies where they have a similar feed or similar feed technology that doesn't work as well because the design of the thing, meaning how it works, how you interact with it is not as effective. And so you need those two things to come together. And I think when those two things come together, that's when you have really beautiful outcomes.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Want VCs to move forward into, and so a big part of what we do is try to be huge evangelists for design. And whenever we meet with other investors, whenever we meet with founders, kind of continuously champion the value of design and kind of show its effectiveness in building great companies.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, so I think one of the trends, I do think that more and more VCs value design, we are seeing that, and I think that's great. You're seeing more designers join VC firms as design partners, and I think we're seeing more interest from designers. There's a lot more designers being angel investors, and I think we'll see more designers wanting to be actual investment partners. So someone like Scott Belsky or like Jeff Vean. So we're seeing that happen. At the same time, I think there is still a vast majority of investors who view design as this thing that you kind of add on after the fact, or that is, you know, kind of a visual layer that is not necessarily a necessity in building a company. And we want to get to the place where great design, great engineering, and great tech are table stakes in terms of building a great startup going forward. And so that's the world that we want to see and that we.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “In terms of our design background, helping to support companies, there's a couple ways. So one is as a designer that's built products at Facebook and then before that I actually worked at agencies. And so I've built products for a lot of companies. So I actually know what makes a great product and what makes a bad product because I've built them before.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Something that is given to designers. And so the other really interesting thing when we interview the 50 top designers is that they also said, hey, these are the issues that we're seeing. And by the way, if you guys tackle this, we'll support you. We'll give you our time. We'll give you our money. Like we're going to back you. And so it was a very mission-oriented start to this endeavor, if you will. And it was one that took a lot of people and a lot of their energy to come together to start. And so that was kind of the beginning of it that we knew that we had a real need in the market and a lot of people who would be willing to go to bat with us to do it.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “A lot of designers didn't have role models to model their behavior after, right? Like engineers, I think are 20 to 30 years ahead of us in that regard. And so many designer founders were just unknown. And so designers didn't really celebrate those folks or try to emulate those folks. So that was a reason, for example, we started a book, an ebook that we published called Designer Founders, just to try to get those stories out there and inspire more designers to take that path. And then another theme was outdated education. So a lot of the teachers in design education came from the agency world. And so they kind of pushed designers back into that service-oriented world, not into a path of entrepreneurship. And that exists to this day. Actually, even the design and tech report was saying that about 86% of design students say they acquire their skills outside of the coursework. So I think a lot of design education still needs to catch up both teaching the skills that designers need in startups, but also even making that path.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And one of the themes that we actually ended up interviewing about 50 designers, so similar to the way you're interviewing a bunch of VCs, so for us, it's research, right? It's basically research. We said, well, let's interview a bunch of designers and see, well, why isn't this happening? And we found a few themes once we interviewed a bunch of people. So as an example, a lack of capital. A lot of designers didn't have great connections to VCs. And actually, a lot of VCs at the time didn't really value design that much. So like Airbnb is a great example, like a ton of investors passed on them because they didn't understand design as a differentiation for them.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Wasn't it? Yeah, so Enrique knew Dave and Dave brought him on to help those companies do design well. What was interesting there was actually some of the task rabbit was in that ZimRide now Lyft. I was part of that. So Enrique had, you know, he was part of building these companies early on. And what he was trying to do was help them do design really well. But what he found was when he would return to those companies three, six, nine months after he do these design sprints with them is that they would no longer practice these great design principles unless they had a designer on the founding team. And so he was also interested in getting better design products and services. And he was thinking, man, maybe instead of trying to make startups more design oriented, we should make designers more startup oriented. And so that's when we came together and started working kind of nights and weekends, thinking about this problem. How do we get more designers to take the path of entrepreneurship? How do we get better design products and services?”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Facebook, but when I walk into a school or a hospital, they're using software that looks like it was designed in 1995. So I started talking to a lot of designers I knew at that time about how do we make a change here and how do we get better design products and services in the world. And one of those designers was Enrique Allen, who Enrique first met in 2007 when I started building and designing the Facebook platform at that time. And he was working at the Facebook fund, which was a fund started to help companies build on top of Facebook.”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So before Designer Fund, I was a manager at Facebook managing the communication design team. So that's the team that does a lot of the visual branding, brand storytelling, a lot of the marketing pages that you see on Facebook. So that was our team. And I was going out and trying to meet a lot of new designers to grow the team. And when I was out and about in the startup land, if you will, a lot of folks would come to me and say, hey, I'm starting a company and I'm trying to hire my first designer. How do I do that? And I asked them what spaces your company in. And it'd be spaces like healthcare and energy and education. And I started thinking to myself, well, why aren't designers joining these companies? Also, why aren't designers starting these companies? And it also got me worried about the future thinking these spaces are at risk of not having well-designed products and services. And so the last thing I wanted was in five, seven years down the line, to have a beautifully designed”

    2017-02-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why Venture Is A Service Product? Why There Is No Such Thing As Product Market Fit & Why Startups Need To Be More Design Orientated with Ben Blumenfeld, Co-Founder & General Partner @ Designer Fund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source