Design for Startups by Garry Tan (Part 2)

Now's the super practical section of how to find and choose designers. We can get through this really quickly. Happy to answer questions afterwards about it, but you know the basic questions we always get asked is, you know, well when, when and how. The reality of it is there are so many ways to answer this, but this is just, you know, super boilerplate advice. It's that pre-seed and probably pre-A. You still need a co-founder probably to do it, and then you could probably get by with a little bit of consulting.

By Series A, you should probably, unless you truly have nothing that has a user-facing element, which is rare, I mean even developer APIs today, you know, I would argue that you need a developer API designer who sort of runs through this whole process. But just for a developer experience is incredibly valuable; that's make-or-break for, you know, even highly technical products. You know, that's when you should really start thinking about your first hire.

And then, you know, by Series B what you really should think about is how do you hire a team. A lot of people reach Series B and they're actually, you know, they're still at the first hire stage. And the difficult part is if you actually have 10-15 engineers and you're trying to hire that first designer and you don't have, you're not going to hire a team, that's actually like a little bit of a nightmare for a designer to work at.

Which makes sense actually to be the only person on that whole team in charge of design, and you versus 20 engineers is a very scary thing for a designer. So this might be a little outdated, but this is, you know, sort of what I've always used in the past. There are just websites online to sort of find designers. Dribbble is incredible for portfolio, you can get a lot out of LinkedIn, look for, you know, companies in your space that have done design very, very well, and you can just very point-blank start reaching out to them.

Behance, Crop, I mean all of these are websites, and you should just go check out AIGA; even has a little database of member designers on there. When I'm thinking about hiring people directly for a full-time role or even for contract, there are a bunch of schools that have worked well for me: CCA, MICA, NYU, MIT, RISD, Parsons, Stanford. This is really not a comprehensive list, and frankly, there are so many incredibly good designers, you know, who have never been to a design school.

In terms of finding consultants, there's really two paths here. One is to go ahead and find an individual, so you know, it turns out that there are a lot of people who you can kind of use this as a way to recruit them. So some of the best folks they actually really like to work on a lot of different projects all of the time, and you know there's actually a very large pool of individuals for basically individual consultants.

And they're hard to get, and you might have to email a lot of them, but you can reach out. You can't hire them as temp consultants, and if there's a really good fit that could be a way to get to know them to come on board. A really cool trick that I've heard for people who just need low-cost logo design and visual design, there's actually an incredible number of people out there in the world who are not first-world designers, and they're totally available on 99designs, Fiverr. I think this is not, you know, there are probably a bunch of other places like that.

The trick that I've heard that you could use is, you can actually take your job, put it on one of these job boards, and then don't just do it for, you know, one, don't just hire one job; you could hire 20 jobs and then look at the output of those 20 different people and then personally befriend the person who does some of the best work. And you'll find people in, you know, all around the world: Philippines, Thailand, Eastern Europe, everywhere—real, I mean Africa, Asia, Europe, like, you know, even the United States—people who are incredibly talented who, you know actually, but they're just starting out in their careers where they don't know how to actually get great jobs.

And you could be that way too, that they learn about startups, you know, design firms—there are just so many. You know, the difficulty with design firms is you kind of have to find one that is willing to work with startups, and you know, many of them the bread and butter for the best design firms truly is working with Fortune 500 companies for outrageous sums of money. So it can be very difficult to find ones that will work with startups.

You know, Design Labs is the one out of DC that I use the most, but there are, you know, our giant directories, and frankly, referrals are sort of your best bet. And then I want to call out a company that just graduated from YC a few weeks ago called Play-Doh Design; their URL is useplaydoh.com. You should definitely reach out to them; I think that they do a very, very amazing job.

So how do you actually attract a designer to work at a startup? And you know, really sort of the ideal at Series A or even where you're at right now is like, you know, if you are truly a consumer-focused company, you kind of need a co-founder on there who can actually run this for you. But later on, especially, you know, if you're a three or four person team, you can usually find one ideally unicorn to come join and give them, you know, a much more senior role. That that'll be fairly important at Series A.

But once you do have a larger team of five to ten engineers, it gets really scary for a designer who's used to working with teams at a design firm or working at, you know, via Facebook or one of the large tech companies. Like, they're used to sitting with other people who spend all of their time thinking about all of the things that we were just talking about, with wireframes and users and personas.

So it can be incredibly scary for those designers to come and work for you much later stage if you don't plan to hire a team that is diversified that, you know, it just gives them a really good day-to-day. You know, and then at the end of the day, like being able to be very crisp about what those roles are, that's the other part of hiring a team that's incredibly important. It's going to be very, very hard to find a unicorn, but often you can break it down by the exact things that I mentioned.

Like, they're incredibly good PMs who have great resumes, who have great backgrounds, who, you know, that's one coherent role. Interaction designers, sometimes they can't make things that are pretty, but they are incredibly empathetic; they're able to think through, you know, they're great writers, they're incredible communicators, and that's what you would look for in that role. And finally, visual design; that's probably the part that is, you know, oh yeah, but it often stands on its own. It doesn't have to, and so it's just a different skill set.

And then, really quickly, I mean it's actually very effective for startups who want to hire design teams to actually write about it. Content marketing works extremely well; social media works incredibly well. And you know, if you're all engineers but you're already thinking about this and talking through a lot of the terms that I was talking about, well that's a culture fit for designers because, you know, that's basically what they want. They want executives or workplaces or founders who understand and speak their language.

And so that's why I encourage you guys to be very open with do-it-yourself to do it, to understand these things because even if you don't do it in, you know, down the road, you're actually far better at evaluating, managing, and working closely with people who do and who are very good at it. How do you actually interview these designers as well? This is typically what I examine, you know, do a quick phone screen at the end.

Like, it's actually, you know, no matter how beautiful a portfolio is, it's just so hard to work with people who have sort of their own vision that cannot communicate. And so the phone screen, it's really all about, you know, great communication skills. I think that's incredibly essential. And then when they actually come and meet you in the team, you know, actually have them walk through the hard decisions, the trade-offs.

Like, we spend a lot of time about product design; you want to see exactly that kind of thought about personas, about prioritization, what are the difficult trade-offs? Because there always are in every type of product you could design. And finally, I recommend whichever founder has been doing the design or the product; you know you've already been solving problems that you might have.

So the key thing there is if you've already spent your, you know, 2,000 hours thinking about a given problem, you know, it's the best for you to actually spend time walking through a candidate over and over again and just to make sure that you think through these things the same way that they do. So you can read this later, but you know, it's pretty straightforward. You know, think about design; you don't want people who are complainers.

Actually, it's pretty common; you know, you want someone who's empathetic and listens to your needs. It's, you know, it's usually bad for someone to talk about themselves a lot. And so, you know, going back to the empathy point, that's incredibly important. You know, the funniest thing that I like to use is when someone's, when I ask them a design question, if they just go to the whiteboard and just start drawing, they fail.

Because wait, why didn't you ask about the users? Who's it for? What's the problem? And so, you know, these are just guidelines; there's so many ways to interview. You know, if you don't have a really good design leader on your team, I highly recommend that you go to a friend or someone who you do respect who can do this stuff to just be like sort of a final check before you do hire someone.

So, you know, these are a bunch of books that I've sort of referred to throughout the talk. This is just a starting point; this is far from comprehensive. But you know, if you bought every single one of these books and read it, that you know front to back, you would be a pretty good designer. Maybe I hear a bunch of links that you should probably read afterwards—you know, "Taste from Makers" is one of these PG essays that, you know, I think not a lot of people talk about, but it's incredibly timeless, so I highly recommend that.

And then these are links that are very specific about, you know, how do you write a PRD, what's your first wireframe. And then these other websites, we just really, really like because there's so much there that, you know, this field is incredibly deep. So thank you so much for spending and making it all the way to the end of this talk. It's an hour-and-a-half, 90 minutes; we made it through a hundred and four slides.

So thank you for sitting with me. I will leave you with just one final thought, and it's truly that, you know, what we're talking about with startup design is only one of this three-legged stool, and your startup success truly lies at the intersection of all of these things. So thank you so much. Thank you for spending time with me. I know that was a lot.

So, the question is how important is an "About Us" page? I mean, yeah, this isn't necessarily a design thing. I actually really think it's important in that going back to our, you know, moment where we were talking about how alone we are as in this, in this, you know, sort of product barren product landscape. You know, you just feel so alone, and the "About Us" page is the one place where you as founders can tell your story.

Like everyone is spending so much time trying to be incredibly, I mean they're trying to imitate Microsoft; they're trying to be Google, right? And you know, you should embrace how powerful it is that you're trying to do this thing and being a real human being, answering emails, and putting your name on the website. I mean, I would argue that that's why one of the big reasons why Coinbase was so successful.

I mean, Brian Armstrong very early on, he was probably the only person in the whole Bitcoin world who was willing to put their name, you know, the address, like I mean just basic things to make it an incredibly real, real thing. So I, you know, I think "About Us" is very important for your relationship with your customers, and that's not a design thing.

Yes, how do you ask questions that really let you accurately see your user? There's a lot of times, you know, you might be doing a user interview and you feel like they're not—yeah. So I guess the question is how do you actually, well, you know, how do you properly ask questions to sort of get the story of your user?

You know, the hard part here is there's not really one way to do it. I think it really does come back to being a good interviewer and thinking through, I mean asking open-ended questions is actually a really good way to do it. It's just, you know, tell me about your day and like, oh, you know, tell me about—you can even seize on emotion because the best problems to solve were actually incredibly emotional ones.

It's like, I get frustrated when blah or I get mad when blah, right? Like those are a lot of very, very strong—you know, going back to, you know, I think Jeff might have taught me this actually just purely that, you know, you really want to look for things, you know, hair-on-fire problems, you know, things that actually get people upset. You know, like emotion, it can be an incredibly powerful and good thing.

So open-ended questions and look for emotion. Yes, yeah, so first question is about prototyping, and you know, I have a confession to make: I have not done a lot of prototyping simply because I am always in such a rush to get the code done that the second I know what I want to build, I just build it, and then I ship it, and then I'll just do it live.

And so I haven't personally gotten a lot of use out of prototyping, but I know that it's an incredibly valuable tool, and that's just a weird one for me because I'm just always—I would rather just ship the thing and have it be out there. Yeah, and then sorry, the second—yeah, so the question is, you know, if you know a problem but you haven't found the solution, you know the hard part there is, like, it's not totally clear to me that design can solve it.

You know, what you describe maybe is either a business problem or a technology problem. You know, it sometimes is a design problem if there's, you know, it's—I don't know; I mean the hard part is these things are so squishy, right? Like if it's a business problem, then you don't have distribution. People don't know they have the problem; you can't get in front of them. Or if it's a technology problem, then it's like, I mean, yeah, how do we actually build the thing? And if we're not capable of doing it, then design can't solve it, right?

How about you just keep building things until you get it right? Do what Jeff said over here—yes, please. The question is, are there places where you should maintain your distance? I can't think of any at the moment; there probably are. I mean, it was a really big advantage for them to, you know, be out in the open.

I could imagine being, if it's an incredibly competitive and if you want to be secretive, there are cases where you don't want to be that open, and that does happen especially for, you know, something that's easily copied or something that, you know, is incredibly enterprise-focused. So it's not important for a lot of people to know about it. Those are the main scenarios where I think secrecy turns out to be very important.

But most people tend to err on the side of more secrecy than less, you know, the standard YC-ism around this that I very much believe: you know, whenever you're creating something new, you're not competing against all of the other people out there; you're only competing against obscurity. You're competing against, like, the back button. And so to the extent that that's true, being as open as possible, getting as many people to know about you as possible, and being a human being and having that interplay, that's really good.

The question is, god, is controversy—I mean, it depends on the type of a controversy, you know. One of the funniest examples of me giving very bad advice and me very being very relieved that the founder did not take that advice was a company called Soylent. So they came in through YC; they were working on something totally different in networking equipment, and I sat down with them in this room for office hours and they said, "Great news! We have this incredible—we have, you know, all of these orders; people love this thing! Oh, by the way, we're gonna stick with the name Soylent."

And I said, "Please, please don't call it that. Do you know what that means? Haven't you seen the movie?" And it turns out that, you know, the entire reason why they were able to get probably a billion dollars worth of earned, you know, free advertising, the reason why they have an incredibly powerful business today is purely because they found exactly the right kind of controversy.

Ninety percent of people who love food hear about it and say, "This is terrible! I hate it!" In fact, they hate it so much; they’re at dinner and they're telling everyone they know about it. And then ten percent of people hear about it and they're like, "Oh my god, I need that now!" So there are cases where controversy can be incredibly powerful.

They're sorry; thank you guys.