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...
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.
'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.
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.
Good designers are rare, and good founders are rare. Individuals who are both good designers _and_ good founders should be extremely rare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But sure, whatever cutesy anecdote or impression of reality you want to sell me will also suffice.
Please though, if you disagree with me, open a dialogue. As an technology investor, who would you rather fund?
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?
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
