Featuring Garry Tan too!
115 karma · joined August 27, 2009
I've learned first hand immersing myself in communities like East Palo Alto with http://muralmusicarts.org and in nations like Myanmar, South Africa & the White Mountain Apache tribe with http://extreme.stanford.edu.
Currently I think of meaningful impact as:
-The depth of behavioral change you create in an individuals' lifetime
-The breadth and scale of behavioral interactions created eg you use Instagram for 1min/day for a month with 100 friends vs a computer for 12hrs/day for life with millions of people (note: I'm not saying one is more or less meaningful than the other; small/simple interactions can turn into something big)
Secondly, I find it difficult to do something "meaningful" without a clear purpose or intention to create impact...(while admitting that at the early stages, visions are often opaque and intentions change)
How entrepreneurs respond to "how are you creating meaningful impact?" helps me decide which startups to invest in...wish I could write more but need to go back to DOing...
Others say: "Impact is a change in the state of the world brought about by an intervention. It’s the final result of behaviors (outcomes) that are generated by activities (outputs) that are driven by resources (inputs)." -Kevin Starr, Mulago Foundation
Notes: -Know your mission (in 8 words using verb, target, & outcome) ex. save pre-mature babies in poor countries http://embraceglobal.org/
-Measure the right thing (the single best indicator)
-Measure it well (the right baseline & interval + show that it was you eg tight story, matched control, randomized controls)
A little algorithm to think about the impact you're creating: Is it needed? Does it work? Will it get to those who need it? Will they use it right?
Text: http://www.mulagofoundation.org/ideas/r/how-we-think-about-i...
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMEpvxGBkFU<br/>;
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/aynne/design-for-real-impact-0610
Other points of view: -"A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same." Donella Meadows http://thinkinginsystems.org/
-"Purpose first, then profit" as part of Umair Haque's New Capitalist Manifesto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz2Zc9UJFUo
-"Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations." http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact/
And we want more but the startup designer path is broken. Just look at the thousands of responses on Quora for hints... I don’t even have to ask and bet that many of your companies are looking to hire a designer.... but the problem is, designers are being taught outdated education, not being mentored by other startup designers, and there’s intense competition. If you think the problem is bad here, it gets worse globally.
We see this trend growing as more consumer startups are succeeding because of replicable methods for great core product idea discovery and continuously well executed user experience, not just pretty pixels. In fact we’ve invested in a number designer founders including Votizen’s Jason Putorti, ColourLovers (also YC), WorkersNow, Slideshare, Forrst, Foodspotting, Punchd, MotionMath, Visual.ly...
So the question is how do we create more designers like Jason Putorti, who not only have the more traditional visual ability to make things look pretty, but more importantly have the engineering and development skillz along with business sense to effectively launch startups and be successful.
This begs the follow up question, so where do these great designers go? Many of my top designer friends are at agencies and big tech companies where they hone their craftsmanship and are respected. However, too few take the leap to venture out on their own and become founders/leaders, even when they get frustrated being mercenaries and trading their time for cash that doesn’t scale...but some actually risk leaving the cush job...
Like consultants from Adaptive Path. On their website they actually embrace designers like Jeff Veen who sold his company to Google and Ryan Freitas one of our mentors, who sold his company to AOL. So how can we create an environment for folks like this to take the entrepreneurial leap...
They can take The d.fund path. We aim to remove this activation barrier with hand pick designers from top schools, tech companies, freelancers, even globally, to help foster a new generation of designer founders. In the process we also will create more designers available for hire and develop specialized design consulting for startups as a means to train and stay alive, not an end.
We’ve been growing up & to the right with hand picked and filtered designers by being radically collaborative with other groups and internally teaching our own design bootcamp and curriculum inspired by the Stanford dschool, Janice Fraser’s LUXr and the whole lean startup movement. We also plan to host an even better WarmGun conference to bring together more designers and developers later this year in NYC...
More top designers are joining our community everyday because it’s not about Dave, me or any one designer in residence...it’s about a scalable designer ecosystem that is committed to helping produce designers that solve meaningful problems in our world, not one trick ponies & pseudo attention sucking innovation...
Many of you may have seen the YC post that got thousands of views about how it’s like the Marines...which makes me wonder what happens when you combine an empathetic Jedi Designer with an elite Marine Hacker...I think you get an amazing force of real innovation....
So, help create the best path for startup designers by joining us and not just investing at least $50k in a designer founder to participate in our next accelerator batch in Mid May, but more importantly... provide the education, mentorship & especially engineering skills to make the startup designer ecosystem healthy & sustainable...
I'm curious about the distribution of meetings/term sheets for the investors you highlighted.
Also interested in the second and third order effects of introductions to investors. Who has the best recommendation/conversion in the valley? *Need to do my HW on papers, dissertations, etc. to formulate better questions but seems like we could run tests to validate some of your points with our teams...
Thank you, Enrique
Sorry would of posted earlier but failing to get my username enriqueallen back :(