UpTrajectory Review
In a recent interview, Ben Blumenrose shares insights into his creative journey from childhood tinkerer to venture capitalist. He emphasizes the importance of fostering creativity and design thinking, not just in personal projects but also in the companies he invests in. Blumenrose's approach highlights how hands-on experiences can shape innovative thinking, which is crucial in today's competitive business landscape.
For small business owners, Blumenrose's perspective serves as a reminder that creativity can be a powerful driver of success. As he invests in design-led companies, operators should consider how they can incorporate creative problem-solving into their own business strategies. This week, think about how you can encourage a culture of experimentation and innovation within your team, as it could lead to unique solutions and competitive advantages.
““It was this intersection of design, creativity, technology, and just tinkering,” he says.” — Fast Company
Takeaway: Encourage creativity and experimentation in your business to drive innovation and competitive advantage.
From the original item — Fast Company:
It would be very easy for Ben Blumenrose to buy his nearly 7-year-old daughter a kit to build a Rube Goldberg machine. Instead, he gave her some spent toilet paper rolls, pieces of cardboard, and bits and bobs found around their house. That’s because she’ll need to play, imagine, and pivot with these objects. It’s his way of helping her discover the value of tinkering, an activity that shaped his way of thinking. As a child, he hacked the first video games he bought and figured out how to use his computer to make art. “It was this intersection of design, creativity, technology, and just tinkering,” he says. “That is where I came from.”
That intersection still informs where Blumenrose is going. After holding every imaginable design role in his career (working at an ad agency, in-house at CBS, and eventually at Facebook, where he served as lead designer for five years), Blumenrose shifted to venture capital. He is a cofounder and the managing partner of the 14-year-old Designer Fund, which invests in early-stage design-led companies like the payment platform Stripe, the telehealth startup Ro, and the product development tool Linear. We talked to him about his career path, his love of art, and why it’s important to help steer funds toward design and creativity.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
My background is fine arts. I was the kid drawing in the back of the class and if I was allowed to paint, I’d paint whenever I could. Right around fourth or fifth grade was when computers became a thing you could buy. I was hooked on the idea that I could make art and use artistic skills on a computer. It was a different kind of medium. When I was around 15 or 16 years old, people would pay me to do art on computers. I knew that was the thing I wanted to do.
I’ve had every kind of design role you can imagine. My life-changing experience was working at Facebook. I was brought on to be one of the first designers there and to build all of the things they needed. This is the reason I’m an investor at all. As Facebook got successful, I started to get inbound requests from founders asking for help with design.
Design has this specific thing it’s trying to help companies solve. The reason I started the Designer Fund was because design was always coming in too late. It was like someone looking for an architect three years into building a high rise. The result is what you’d expect: an unusable building that needs to be torn down. Who is controlling the money that’s letting people build this way? I thought there should be someone from a background like mine who directs the flow of money.
We approach the work as designers. How do we bring design and creativity and delight into venture capital? The type of people we invest in are like-minded, like Evan Sharp, who started Pinterest [and is the founding CEO of West Co]. We find those people and then help them build design and creativity into the ground floor. We do a lot of storytelling because our mission is to influence the venture ecosystem.
With the rise of AI tools, we were undergoing a big shift in how design work is done. People are starting to work quite differently. I needed to fall back on my design background and approach this with curiosity. I met as many people as possible, trying to understand how this work was being done and what was working and what was not. The inkling of a shift I got was a much bigger wave then I realized. We ultimately released State of AI and Design, a report on the trends.
I approach each day with tasks. I make lists of what I want to accomplish in three or six months. I also leave space for the things that come out of left field. If you looked at the calendar of a lot of investors, it would give you a heart attack: 12 to 15 meetings, five times a week. I explicitly don’t do that. I need to be able to kind of turn on a dime for when an opportunity arises, whether it’s something I need to do in an hour or something I need to spend the next few days exploring. A thought I had on a walk could take an hour or three days or three months to work out.
A big part of that is thinking in public. A lot of people have this point of view that the stuff you share in public has to be high conviction so you appear like an authority. For me there’s moments when you do that, but there’s also moments when I’ll share, “Hey, this is a conversation I had.” I will see where other people take it and I then build off the creativity of the thread.
Constraints breed creativity. We have to be more clever around the work we do and how to finance it and put it out there. I like having constraints because it forces us to do things in a different way.
I’m a big believer in books and long-form reading. It’s important to have intentional space to let your mind sit in something deeply and to challenge your world view. I read books every day. Works of fiction have inspired folks to dream about new types of projects or explore the unknown.
I create space during the day and let a thing I’m thinking about percolate. You’re just on a walk, and you let a thing simmer in your mind—no music or podcast. I see people working on a thing while listening to music or with a TV playing in the background. So many different inputs at once—how can you possibly let your brain sit in this one idea?
Your best mind energy is right in the morning and right after lunch. There’s research to prove this. I put time blocks in my calendar for when I have to think through a big idea or do something more meaty. I’m very aware of the energy that’s required of those things.
I think a lot about the importance of creativity for the future. We live in a world where it’s both harder to be creative and yet more important. All of us have these experts in every field with us 24/7. In that world, it’s important for us to figure out what other domain might know the answer to a question.
Training the next generation to see the multiplicity in objects is important. My daughter and I were creating this marble run and it was getting late and dark. We had gone to a party and gotten this little strip of LED lights in a tube attached to a battery. She said, “I wonder if we could pull it out of here and attach it to this?” She sees these things as composite parts that she can pair or break open. The outcome you get when people are thinking that way is going to be much better than in a world where people see a cup as a cup and a shelf as a shelf.