The Designer as a Founder

The Designer as a Founder

For a long time, design was seen as something that happened after the idea — the layer of polish you added once the engineers built the system and the business team defined the model. But that’s no longer the reality. Today, designers aren’t just shaping pixels. We’re shaping products, markets, and companies themselves.

I know this firsthand, because I’ve lived both lives: the product designer in tech and the entrepreneur building businesses from scratch.

Why designers make great founders

Designers are wired to notice pain points. We’re trained to look at messy, real-world problems and break them down into flows, constraints, and opportunities. Where others see inefficiency or frustration, we see systems that can be redesigned.

• At Nextdoor, I worked on Ads Monetization — exploring how local businesses could meaningfully connect with neighbors without overwhelming them. It was part craft, part psychology, part business model.
• At Chegg, I saw how students struggled to navigate complex academic resources and helped design solutions that put clarity back in their hands.
• With Bridge Immigration (later acquired by Boundless), I helped create an immigration platform that turned bureaucratic pain into transparent, navigable steps.
  

But my design instincts didn’t stop at software. They became the foundation of my entrepreneurial work.

From screen to street

When COVID hit, I didn’t just design digital flows. I designed an entire food concept. Afghan Burrito started as a bold experiment: what happens when you merge the flavors of Afghan cuisine with the Mission-style burrito, wrap it in gold foil, and create a brand people can rally around?

It was product design thinking applied to hospitality:

• User research = talking with customers at the counter, iterating on proteins, sauces, and portion sizes.
• Brand design = creating an identity around the “Golden Burrito,” building hype through visuals and storytelling.
• Systems design = scaling from late nights wrapping burritos myself to a 12-person team, complete with training, workflows, and even English classes to invest in employees.
  

In two years, Afghan Burrito went from an idea to a million-dollar revenue business, anchoring a food court in Berkeley and becoming a recognizable brand.

That same mindset flows into my other ventures:

• Morning Skin, a skincare brand built with the same care for systems and experience.
• Hastily, an AI-powered service platform that protects customers through transparent contracts.
• Tijara, an iOS day-trading app integrating real-time AI models to automate trades.
  

Different industries, same pattern: design as the foundation for building companies.

The new founder’s toolkit

Ten years ago, a designer who wanted to build a business would hit a wall. You needed engineers, data scientists, investors — an entire apparatus before your idea even touched a customer.

Now? That wall is gone. AI tools, nocode platforms, and lightweight infrastructure have changed the rules.

• With tools like Cursor and Claude Code, I can guide AI to write production-level code by leveraging my design background — defining flows, constraints, and user outcomes, then letting AI fill in the technical layer.
• With AWS + Lightspeed, I can stand up trading infrastructure that used to require a team of quants.
• With Webflow, I can design, brand, and launch portfolios and landing pages without waiting on engineers.
  

The designer’s ability to move from idea → prototype → business has never been stronger.

Where design and entrepreneurship converge

Designers bring more than aesthetics to the founder’s role. We bring:

• Empathy – seeing problems from the user’s perspective.
• Systems thinking – connecting touchpoints across brand, product, and business model.
• Experimentation – prototyping fast, learning fast, and iterating in real time.
• Storytelling – crafting the narrative that turns a product into a brand.
  

It’s the same toolkit that helps me balance running a restaurant, building startups, and raising two daughters — all while pursuing the next frontier in design and technology.

Looking forward

The future belongs to designer-founders. Not because we “add polish,” but because we see the whole picture. We can go from zero to something — from a napkin sketch to a product to a company — and we can do it with clarity, speed, and empathy.

For me, design isn’t just a career. It’s how I build businesses, how I create culture, and how I shape the world around me.

And that’s why the designer is no longer just a designer. The designer is a founder.