Office Hours for Black & Underrepresented Founders
We're hosting office hours for founders and pre-founders from diverse backgrounds — especially groups that have been historically underrepresented in tech — including African American / Black, Hispanic / LatinX, Indigenous / Native American and more. Office hours appointments are limited but we'll do our best to accommodate as many founders as possible. Please subscribe to our newsletter to be notified about future Office Hours events.
The following Designer Fund team members and advisors will be offering office hours:
Ben Blumenrose, Co-founder of Designer Fund
Previously, Ben was a design lead at Facebook for over 5 years where he helped build products for nearly a billion people and grow Facebook’s world-class design team. He was also the design director at Varien which he helped build into one of the world’s leading e-commerce firms and a designer at CBS where he designed many of their prime time show web experiences.
Enrique Allen, Co-founder of Designer Fund
Previously, Enrique was a designer at venture capital firms, including 500 Startups, Facebook’s fbFund, and Venrock, where he helped invest in companies like Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT), Wildfire (acquired by Google) and Behance (acquired by Adobe). He's a Stanford University alum, former Division 1 soccer player and senior lecturer at the Stanford dschool.
Dantley Davis, VP of Design at Twitter
Dantley leads design and research at Twitter. Prior to joining Twitter, Dantley was at Facebook where he led product design for Stories, News Feed, and Video. He spent 7 years at Netflix, where he was responsible for design and product strategy for television and mobile experiences. His work transformed streaming user interfaces across the SVOD industry. Dantley received his undergrad degree and MBA from the University of San Francisco.
Scott Tong, former Head of Product Design at Pinterest
Scott Tong is a startup advisor. Previously he was an EIR at IMO Ventures, Head of Product Design at Pinterest, co-founder at IFTTT, and Principal Designer at IDEO.
Diógenes Brito, Staff Product Designer at Slack
Diógenes is a self + Stanford taught designer and engineer with a focus on digital interface design and user-centered interaction design. I have a programming and web design background, but my main strength is multi-disciplinary design thinking, collaborating with my team to make it greater than the sum of its parts.
Steve Vassallo, General Partner at Foundation Capital
Steve Vassallo is a General Partner at Foundation Capital. He joined Foundation in 2007 from Ning, a social platform he helped launch in 2004 and where he was Vice President of product and engineering. Before Ning, Steve was director of engineering at Immersion [IMMR], which pioneered tactile feedback and human touch technology. Previously, Steve was a project leader and design engineer at IDEO, where he developed more than a dozen successful products for companies including Cisco, Nike, BMW, Steelcase, McDonalds, and Caterpillar. Steve has led investments in, and served on the boards of Sunrun [RUN], Control4 [CTRL], Cerebras, Mode, ForUsAll, Simple Habit, Framer, Loft Orbital, Mantle, Bolt Threads, Flight Labs, Pocket (acquired by Mozilla), PrivateCore (acquired by Facebook), and Sentient Energy (acquired by KES). Steve holds a BS Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an MS from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Stanford GSB.
Dan Becker, Head of Product Design, Media at Instagram
Dan has worked for some of the world's most inspiring and progressive brands such as Tesla, Nest, Square, Apple, Airbnb, and Instagram. He has a passion for bringing products to market that solve real user needs and drive businesses forward through beautifully crafted experiences.
Dan currently leads the Product Design teams at Instagram building long-form content ecosystems and creator monetization products. Prior to that he led design teams at Airbnb which concepted and scaled the Airbnb Plus product tier from $0 to $750M ARR in under three years.
In his spare time, he serves as a Design advisor and early-stage investor, and loves exploring the incredible Bay Area topography by bike as much as possible.
Dan Bomze, Founder of Doubles, MileIQ (acquired by Microsoft) and Cleanwell (acquired Pinstripe Capital)
Dan is an entrepreneur, advisor and occasional investor in private equity funds and early stage companies. Over the last twenty years he has started six companies of his own spanning consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, sporting goods, professional services, mobile productivity and social gaming. For the last five years, Dan has been working closely with a portfolio of companies as an active advisor/investor and frequently as a Board member. Dan graduated from Stanford with a degree in product design and lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.