Why Aren't More Designers Starting Companies? | Hacker News Reader

Why Aren't More Designers Starting Companies?

wired.com

50 pointsaalter48 comments

This was a good attempt, but I don't think this really nailed why designers don't move into founder roles. It has a lot more to do with the psychology of the type of person that goes into being a designer in the first place. It has a lot to do with the nature of art and the fear of failure.

The best designers are often frustrated artists that found comfort in design, where (perhaps subconsciously) they could use their talent without having the success or failure of their work fall 100% on them.

Being a collaborative process, design is kind of a shield from artistic criticism to some degree. If it fails, well it was the client's fault. But when you are known as a designer, and known as the founder, all the creative control comes down on you, which is akin to creating a work of art - with product primarily, but also the entire business as well. Everything you do subconsciously reflects on you as an artist instead of as a designer. Its scary. It can drive a creative person to madness, all of the things that go into a company, all the details that are completely fucking wrong all the time and you can't get control of any of them. Its like a painting with paint that never dries, and keeps dripping down the canvas. You constantly need to be painting or it looks like total crap, and it is hanging in the gallery, right now and everybody can see it. It makes me freaked out just thinking about it.

So while there are few designers who have made the leap to full-time founding entrepreneur I'm fairly certain that every designer has attempted to dip their toes into becoming the founding entrepreneur at least once, hit on this nightmarish reality, and then stepped back into the designer comfort zone with a sigh of relief...

Edit: Downvotes? Really? I write a thoughtful introspective comment based on my personal experience of being a design-trained single founder and you give me downvotes? Ugh

Fear not, truth is severely undervalued. If you want points tell feel good lies.

It's useless advice. Designers can't be founders because they're pussies? Is this really what you think?

I still don't understand why ya'll are supporting the position of 'Designers are just art school-dropouts, too neurotic to be founders.". What sort of reasoning is that?

You're projecting hardcore dude.

'The best designers are often frustrated artists that found comfort in design, where (perhaps subconsciously) they could use their talent without having the success or failure of their work fall 100% on them."

Yeah right. Are you sure you went to design school? Is that what they taught you? That it's where all the failed artists go?

Sometimes, I hate you a lot HN.

Assuming that I made these observations by learning it in art school is "projecting hardcore" as well.

The observations I make are based on an inner circle of friends and business associates I've had over the last 13 years who are predominantly made up of brilliant graphic designers. Not that it puts me in a position of absolute authority on the subject, but I think thats a fair rebuttal.

Honestly, you're armchair psychology-ing from your Cabal of Elite Designers, Lords of Silicon Valley, which is the WORST part of HN - apart from the subconscious need to upvote walls of text they haven't read, because well, whatever, it's long it must be smarter!)

Your argument has absolutely no weight, and it offended me. "Yeah, the thing about designers is that they're failed artists and they're so neurotic. Always worried about what people think so they can't be good founders. That's for people like ME."

Pffft. Whatever. Thanks for ruining my morning again HN.

Well at least it comes from a place of actual experience vs your pithy responses. Honestly, feel of a failure is a thing (to use language that won't trigger your elite-o-meter). I don't necessarily agree that this defines the designer "type" but I applaud the self-awareness to consider something like this.

Everyone has fear of failure, that's just normal. My point is that designers are not just art school dropouts, and I certainlyI still don't understand why ya'll keep supporting that position as if had any merit.

That's an uncharitable way to phrase it though. The point is more like designers are wannabe Picassos who had bigger creative dreams for their work to be based solely on its own merit without any commercial context, but they ended up settling for a day job solving mundane business problems.

It's no different from an engineer getting a safe job at an established company instead of taking the risk to found a company themselves. Only it's a lot riskier for the artist since there's a lot less money in the (working) art world than in the startup world.

Exactly. I used fine art as an analogy here but in reality many of the designers I know have creative ambitions more in terms of music, photography, illustration etc. Basically if you're in a creative job chances are you're doing it because you compromised between the desire to create art and the desire to have a paycheck. Sure there's a handful of people out there who longed to be a designer from childhood rather than adopting it out of practicality, but I'd say they're in the minority

I have a degree in design, I didn't learn such things in school. I've worked numerous jobs in design-related positions for around twenty years now. I've worked with countless people (I won't go so far to say they're "brilliant" because that's a hugely subjective thing) in similar positions or involved in my projects. I, nor anyone I've ever worked with, have had the attitude you are expressing when it comes to design.

You are seriously projecting, the world is bigger than your circle of friends.

I didn't downvote your original post but complaining about downvotes = a downvote. Ugh. Get over it.

Well to be fair I was in negative territory when I posted that

>> Downvotes? Really?

HN is getting to where you can't have an intellectual opposing view. We are being bullied (down voted) into sameness, borg-ness. Are geeks truly petrified of being in the same room with a different personality type? I've up voted you to take the sting away.

Thanks. At least somebody understood the reason why I griped about downvotes

As a designer comfortable with my choice, I always saw design as the tool used to capture and manifest the dreams of others. This creativity is then placed in the view of the world to meet with brutal success, failure or mediocrity. By definition, a designer must be public. They also must imagine themselves in everyone else shoes and use their creativity for others. Artists, for me, are narcissistic. Trying to create only for themselves. And ideally, they should not care about the opinion of others. I strongly believe that good design is harder, more professional and more demanding than art. Having said that , and having started four businesses. I agree that start-ups are much more difficult.

One way to say that with less speculating about motives is that entrepreneurial designers do exist, but they go into art, not business.

Another point I'd make is about disruptive business models. According to Clay Christensen, it's about creating a product that's cheaper and offers a better value than incumbents. In many cases, competitors are providing too much performance, and disruptive businesses offer less performance for much less money. The designer mentality tends to see problems as ugliness, and solutions as beauty, but this doesn't fit into the disruptive innovation model. To a designer, disruptive innovation looks like taking something beautiful and replacing it with an ugly knockoff–the opposite of what they want to do!

This isn't really exclusive to designers. Lots of programmers are the same way, they love elegance and beauty in their code and hate dirty hacks and kludges.

Thats a really good point. Its a hard lesson for any type of craftsman to understand that beauty doesn't always translate to a successful business

Why don't more designers have founder skills? Or why don't more founders have design skills?

Good designers are rare, and good founders are rare. Individuals who are both good designers _and_ good founders should be extremely rare.

That doesn't tell the whole story though. Good engineers are rare too but there still happen to be lots of good founders who are good engineers.

Designer and ex-founder weighing in. One thing I felt was that we had conflicting advice and incentives.

On one hand, incubator advisors, investors, and startup writers would say:

(1) "You should read pg's essays. You have to spend more time finding a market fit. Study your users. Make that your priority."

Frequently, from the same crowd, we'd also something along the lines of:

(2) "Make decisions faster. Ship it. Execution."

My design training was well-suited to (1), and completely undermined in (2). The problem was that we heard (2) a lot more because the main people we were talking to were investors and incubator staff, and their overriding priority was having a functional product with paying customers.

Of course design processes can move faster and balance planning with execution at a startup pace. But that doesn't happen much. The more common scenario is for a designer to be shown a working prototype and then make it prettier / more usable. And maybe that's the most reliable way for startups to get off the ground? I have no idea.

I'm not really a designer or a coder, so my words need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but if i was to ever improve a skill it would be on the design side so I say this with my designer hat on.

The thing is, if you're creating software and launching a business, you've got to be able to solve problems for your customer. While the mind of a designer might be that of problem solving and loving their craft, you invariably can't solve the problem for the client without some coding.

It's far easier to be a developer and code the solution then it is to be a designer and purely design it aesthetically. It doesnt serve much purpose as design alone.

With an MVP you can get away with poor design and some minimal code, but you cant get away with great design and NO functionality - Well you can but pulling it off is harder.

So as a designer, you always need a co-founder that can code, and we all know about bringing on CTO's for just an equity stake. It's not really going to happen.

Maybe they want to design instead of run a business.

I actually think it's largely because designers haven't learned how to execute their own working prototypes for the last little while due to the segmentation of roles in corporations/agencies. But it's not like they are short of great ideas.

I think given another decade with more young people learning both design and code, and companies demanding people know both, we'll see more designers (with rudimentary coding knowledge) starting businesses.

Though, I've always been curious as to why Rasmus Andersson (Spotify, Facebook, Dropbox) never started his own company. I consider him one of the rare people in tech industry who has advanced knowledge of design and code.

Designers that spend time learning both to design and code well aren't great designers. Programming isn't the only core activity in a company, design is intense and none of the designers I know would have time to code even if they knew how; they just have so many things on their plate.

This applies to a small company of < 10 people. Do you really want your only designer writing crappy code while they have a huge backlog of design work to get done?

HN seems to be obsessed the designers are somehow broken because they can't code, that programming is to be worshiped and other essential activities devalued. Maybe this is a problem with the industry as a whole, but lately I have noticed that hiring good designers has become harder than hiring good coders.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Because it's really hard to pitch a company based on a PSD that you can't implement.

But sure, whatever cutesy anecdote or impression of reality you want to sell me will also suffice.

And the derisive contempt against designers on HN continues.

Maybe the tone was a little off-the-cuff, but mjolk has a valid point. You can't implement the idea without some sort of coding. Design alone doesn't cut it, and I say that as someone that has a lot of respect for designers.

I have a design background, I agree with mjolk's point as well.

Designers are fine, but don't tell me that a render is nearly as useful as a prototype.

Please though, if you disagree with me, open a dialogue. As an technology investor, who would you rather fund?

i don't think those are the kind of designers they're talking about, for the most part.

Just because you're a designer doesn't mean you shouldn't have cofounders that can code and do some of the hustling. That's why the hacker/hustler/designer paradigm exists...

I think this is mostly bull, frankly. No matter how easy things get, most startups are meant to solve some kind of problem and they employ technical means to do so. You're never going to get rid of the need for a technical guy, no matter how things change.

The second most useful person is probably going to be a hustler/salesman/guy who knows people, who can get the product attention, or investment, or customers, or all three.

The designer comes in a pretty far third. Good design just isn't critical at early stages for most. And if you really want it, it can probably be contracted, in a way the first two roles never can. Finally, if talking to investors, guy #1 can show you a product or demo; guy #2 can show traction or social proof; what can the designer show?

>And if you really want it, it can probably be contracted, in a way the first two roles never can.

HN (rightly) bashes "idea guys", but there is really only one thing in a startup that cannot be contracted: what the startup is trying to do or achieve.

Design for a startup can be contracted in the same way software engineering can be contracted. That is to say: you will get reasonably good results if you find a good contractor who is a good fit for the project, but it will not be the same as having an employee fully dedicated to create a great product, analyze the market's reaction to the product as it is developed and marketed and adjust the design/the technology to the market's needs and expectations.

If you can contract a designer (and not hire one), you can contract a developer too. Results will be mixed.

This is right: outsourcing design is just like outsourcing development; do it if its not at the core contempancy of your startup. Game startups almost always have design talent in founder roles for this reason. A lot of novel app companies have at the very least design-gineers in founding roles, if not full time designers.

As a designer I find the major hurdle of starting a business is the cost of development.

Also, if we are just starting out on our own, there's a chance that we aren't coming from a job that was paying the kind of money for a good base.

The assumption that I'm some sort of failed artist who 'fell back' to design is bullshit. I'm a creative and design is just one of a dozen outlets I have. I've had a soap company, a candle company, a line of various bath products, sold t-shirts, thrown parties, planned weddings, pressed 1" buttons, provided consultation and various marketing services for bands, wedding photography, product photography and more. My story is not unique for my people. :)

Interesting, although a couple of these factors (wanting to just spend all day working on your passion instead of wearing many hats) don't seem inherently limited to designers. Programmers can have an appreciation for their craft as well!

Totally agree and in fact I say - I'd tell engineers or sales people who just want to do their craft not to start a co. as well.

Ok. I'm a right-brain problem solver. Who wants to make something? I live in SF.

I'm moving down there within the month. I'd love to.

Alright, mp@michaelepierce.com

I was always under the impression that developers are also problem solvers, hence their ease of also coming up with an awesome enough idea to start a company.

Designers are artists. Once a designer does more than drawing and photoshop, they become a front-end developer. Using their primary craft of drawing, where is there to really go after that?

Developers have the advantage of being able to throw together a prototype of their web application and see if it's viable. Developers can also tackle the very difficult coding problems that can give a startup a competitive advantage.

That's a superficial and overly narrow view of design. Design is more than graphic design or interior design. Fundamentally it's the creation of human experiences. Everything that humans build is designed. A designer is someone who specializes in considering how such a creation will interact with the users and world in the task for which it is designed.

In this regard a great designer is more qualified than a developer to create the vision for a startup. The developer's advantage is execution. Why programmers start companies is because they can create a product and launch it even if it looks like shit, and the problem it solves is pointless, and the marketing repels people, they can at least ship a product. A designer by contrast needs to have a technical co-founder or be well-funded.

I think the fundamental difference is that designers are good at optimizing a problem, whereas founders need to be good at picking problems.

The biggest problem is having a genius designer that happens to match perfectly with an engineer that can agree with the initial ideas. This also requires the engineer to be smart enough to realize the importance of the designer and allow her to be the CEO.

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