Last month while in Las Vegas for Adobe’s annual MAX conference, I moderated a panel on design entrepreneurship. The notion that designer co-founders can provide a competitive edge to major new companies is roughly half a decade old now, following the breakout successes of companies like Airbnb, Kickstarter and Pinterest.
The premise of this panel was to check in on that idea, to see how much has really changed for the designer co-founder in that time. The best way to do that, I thought, would be to talk to the designer co-founders who are building new, up and coming companies today.
To that end, I was lucky enough to be able to recruit three superb entrepreneurs: Joey Cofone, designer, CEO and co-founder of Baron Fig; Tiffany Chu, designer and co-founder of Remix; and Tricia Choi, designer and co-founder of MoveWith. To round out the panel with perspective from the investment community, I also invited Enrique Allen, co-director of Designer Fund, to join us. It was a fascinating discussion, especially when we debated the topic of whether a designer co-founder is likely to build a fundamentally different kind of business from other kinds of entrepreneurs.
The panel was live streamed on AdobeLive and Enrique wrote a great post on it that you can read over at designerfund.com. You can watch the replay above, and also peruse AdobeLive’s archive of fantastic video content at be.net/live.
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