The Golden Age of the Design Founder 🔥
There’s a pattern I keep noticing in the most successful founders, and it’s not what I expected. It’s not that they’re engineers or designers, it’s that the best ones think like designers, regardless of their background.
This matters because it contradicts the conventional wisdom about what makes a good founder. For decades, the archetypal founder was an engineer. There were good reasons for this. Starting a company meant building something, and engineers were the people who could build things. But I think we’ve been confusing a historical accident with a law of nature.
The thing about historical accidents is that they persist long after the conditions that created them disappear. And the conditions that made engineering the obvious path to founding are disappearing faster than most people realize.
What’s actually hard now:
Here’s what’s really happening: the bottleneck in startups is shifting from “can you build it” to “do you know what to build.” That might sound like a subtle distinction, but it changes everything.
When the bottleneck was building, engineers had an obvious advantage. They could turn ideas into reality without the coordination cost of explaining what they wanted to someone else. Speed mattered more than precision. You needed to iterate fast, and iteration was fastest when you could code.
But as tools improve (and they’re improving exponentially now), the ability to build is becoming less of a constraint. It’s not that building is easy, it’s that the gap between having a clear vision and manifesting it is shrinking. What’s becoming more valuable is the clarity of vision itself.
This is where something interesting reveals itself. The engineers who succeed aren’t just good at building - they’re good at knowing what to build. They think about user experience. They obsess over details. They have strong opinions about how things should feel. In other words, they think like designers, even if they came up through engineering.
I’m seeing this strongly at Lovable. Both founders are engineers. But what makes them effective isn’t just their technical ability but the way they’re deeply involved in every product decision. They care about the experience, not just the functionality. They can build anything, but more importantly, they know what’s worth building.
Read full article on my blog: https://lnkd.in/eTxW5WeE
