‘Your best mind energy is right in the morning and right after lunch’: Ben Blumenrose on how to bring creativity into venture capitol

FastCompany: 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.” Ben Blumenrose 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.

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The article discusses a significant shift in venture capital towards creativity and design, which is impactful for the industry, though the concept of integrating creativity into business is not entirely new.