Design Is

April 27, 2017
Steve Vassallo

In recent years, design has become as indispensable to modern businesses as technology. Companies, especially startups, ignore it at their peril. At the same time, the very concept of design has evolved. In a world in which you can build anything, design can no longer be confined to the making of pretty surfaces and objects. Design is a process for seeking out the right problems to solve and how to solve them. And the burden now for designers and entrepreneurs is understanding whether something is worth building at all.

The Way To Design is the first guidebook to this new world and this new understanding of design. Based on interviews with scores of design thinkers and designers-turned-entrepreneurs, it sketches out the path to scale up from designer to designer founder. And drawing from his years as an IDEO product designer and his own experiences launching, running, and investing in startups, Foundation Capital general partner Steve Vassallo shares lived-in advice on how to create design-led organizations.

Joe Gebbia, Airbnb’s cofounder and chief product officer, calls The Way to Design, “the first practical and inspirational guide for designers who want to create positive change in the world.”