Welcome Jackie Berardo to the Designer Fund Investment Team
We're excited to welcome Jackie Berardo to the Designer Fund investment team as principal. As a designer, researcher, and investor with deep expertise in new product adoption and UI/UX design, it’s been her mission to invest in and propagate better design in products used by billions. As an investor based in New York City, Jackie will work closely with us to identify and invest in exceptional founders, support due diligence, and improve our operations.
Jackie has led research initiatives for Reality Labs at Meta, helped design Facebook's multi-billion dollar Creator Bonus Program, and supported the launch of Instagram Commerce. Outside of Meta, she co-founded Surge, an e-learning organization for developers and protocols with 30,000 members, and contributes to Forbes on technology topics regularly. Previously, she supported founders as a venture capitalist and angel investor focused on user experience and design.
To help introduce you to Jackie, we asked her to share her perspective on design, investing, and 'the future' in her own words:
You can reach out to Jackie at jackie@designerfund.com, and follow along with her work and investments on X, Instagram, or LinkedIn
Why Design Matters
Growing up as the daughter of an architect and an art history zealot, I learned early that design isn't just about aesthetics — it's the subtle, unconscious language that shapes how we perceive and navigate the world. Every space, interface, and interaction carries intentional choices that influence our behavior and decision-making. 
At Meta, I studied this: how billions of users traced paths designed for them, making completely different decisions in reaction to subtly different interfaces or flows.
I helped design systems that distributed billions of dollars in payouts to creators (Creator Fund), checkout flows that fielded tens of billions of dollars in transaction volume across geographies (Instagram Checkout), and new interfaces for consumer-facing generative AI tools (within Reality Labs). Through each experience, it’s become increasingly clear that the line between success and failure in technology is often drawn by innumerable design decisions.
Why Design-First Investing Matters
In Silicon Valley, design and design research have historically been treated as decoration rather than foundation. Yet, by contrast, interfaces, storytelling, and customer obsession — components of 'product design' — are well understood as factors that make or break early-stage adoption. Venture as an industry recognizes the importance of design values in startup success, but few firms have been bold enough to draw the line from these values to 'design.'
For over 10 years — and for six of which I’ve been following the firm — Designer Fund has connected these dots, and as a result, invested in companies that defined the last decade (including Stripe, Gusto, Notion, Linear, and Omada Health).
In 2021, I left venture capital to join Meta. I planned to learn from the best how design shapes behavior and eventually apply these insights to early-stage investing.
In 2025, I couldn’t be more thrilled to join Ben — one of the earliest designers at Facebook (Meta) — to apply this skillset to invest in a well-designed world at Designer Fund.
On ‘The Future’
In a world where underlying technology is increasingly commoditized by AI, design values and decisions become fundamental.
Low-code tooling and LLMs have democratized technical expertise, magnifying the importance of interfaces and user experiences. Now more than ever, 2025 is the time to prioritize Design and Designers by name.
I'm thrilled to invest in this next wave of Designer Founders — and bet my career that design values become increasingly crucial to startup success.