First Round of Interviews: Jake

Jake is a 2011 graduate of the Master’s of Industrial Design program at UArts. He currently works with a startup called Elect Next. His challenge while being a designer working with a startup is making clear that the client knows the service you’re providing and to make sure they understand what’s included and what’s discluded. While doing user experience design, he has noticed that internet startups don’t realize how much time it actually takes to do user experience design and user testing - he has explained the process many times to different startups, but it seems to take time for the start-up to understand how long it takes.

From the time he’s spent at Good Company Ventures and being involved with social impact internet startups, he’s realized that it’s very challenging to figure out how to monetize social impact internet startups. More importantly, he has noticed that investors are less willing to invest in an internet startup that doesn’t know how to monetize its service or product.

In a discussion about when designers should be involved with a startup, Jake thinks that designers should be involved from the beginning, but he also thinks that a single person doesn’t have enough time and money to afford a designer. Instyead, he believes that more designers should be starting businesses.

Back to First Round of Interviews.

Back to Table of Contents.