Combine: A Design Studio and Venture Fund in One

Today, a couple of friends of mine, Soleio Cuervo and Adam Michela, took the wraps off of their new design studio/venture fund Combine. I almost never make announcements about investments because I’m not much of an investor, other than boring municipal bonds and index funds, but I’m really excited about this for one reason:

Design, as a discipline, is very often brought into startups only when founders feel like they can no longer do without it. We are still at a point in our industry where those who have never worked with a great product designer before believe design is there to animate things, or make decks look shiny, or write blog posts about the geometry of a new logo.

The cascading effects of this sort of thinking are many. Products don’t end up evolving as quickly as they otherwise could. Design, as an industry, continues to struggle with uneven perceptions and expectations. And finally, designers themselves end up with very little equity in the companies they join because they didn’t join early enough.

There are a lot of ways that compensation in the tech world needs to change, but speaking from my own experience only, the clearest line between who makes life-changing money at a company and who does not comes down to when you started and at what level (the “when” part being more important usually). The difference between being a day zero founder and a day one employee is significant. The difference between being hired the day before a Series B round and the day after is significant. The difference between being hired the day before an IPO and the day after is significant. We are talking about, in many cases, one day or one week or one month being the difference between never having to work again when you’re done and barely even noticing a difference in your life.

Is getting in early just being “lucky?” Sure, to a point. But I would argue it’s hitching your horse to the right wagon that is the lucky part. Getting companies to value design and designers at the very earliest stages of product and company development is something we can change if we put some effort it, and that is the part of Combine that I am most excited about.

If Adam and Soleio’s vision of assembling the best established and emerging designers in the world and helping place them inside of well-funded, early stage companies pans out, we will benefit from both better designed products and more designers who share financially in the success of what they help create. That is something I am happy to be a very small part of.

I am not a spokesperson for Combine, so any questions you might have should be directed towards Soleio or Adam. Actually, I can answer one question: it’s pronounced COM-bine. Anyway, if you are a designer or researcher interested in finding out more about the program, I encourage you to get involved. If this sort of thing was around ten years ago, I would have jumped in head first.

Originally published at mikeindustries.com.