The Design VC

Simon Rohrbach (Plane): The Designer-to-Founder Reality Check, and How AI Changes Everything

In this episode of The Design VC, Andy Budd sits down with Simon Rohrbach, founder and CEO of Plane, a customer support platform built for modern B2B teams. Andy first met Simon years ago when Simon was leading design at Deliveroo, so this felt less like a formal interview and more like a long overdue catch-up with someone who’s gone on a seriously interesting journey. Simon is one of the best examples I’ve seen of a designer who’s made the leap into founding, because he hasn’t just carried design craft across, he’s built the founder pragmatism that design teams often resist. There are moments in this conversation where Simon says things that his former self as a design leader would probably have hated hearing. And he’s completely open about that. It’s honest, slightly uncomfortable in the best way, and full of the kind of lessons you only learn once you’re responsible for the whole business, not just the product. We talk about how Plane came to be. Simon was Deliveroo’s first designer and watched the company scale from a tiny team to thousands of people, including a customer support org that grew into the hundreds and beyond. That experience gave him a front-row seat to a brutal problem: support costs can scale linearly with success if your tooling is wrong. After a stint at Index Ventures as an EIR, he teamed up with his former Deliveroo colleague Matt Wagner (a designer-engineer) and started Plane. What I loved is how candid Simon is about the messy middle. Plane started with a big “API-first, Stripe-for-support” infrastructure vision, then hit the wall when that positioning didn’t land. They eventually found their wedge by noticing something obvious in hindsight: modern B2B support was moving into Slack, Teams, Discord and other channels, but most support platforms were still trapped in an email-ticketing mindset. That pivot unlocked revenue, and in a neat twist, the original “infrastructure” thesis is now coming back into fashion because AI has made custom tooling dramatically easier to build. We also get into the stuff most founders dodge. The gap between a great product and a great business. The danger of building the “end state” too early. Why “done today over perfect tomorrow” is a painful but necessary operating principle. And the reality that, at a certain stage, the CEO job is mostly go-to-market, hiring, and running the company’s biggest problem, even when your instincts keep pulling you back to product. Finally, we talk about where AI is taking all of this. Simon shares how the team now prototypes by coding in tools like Cursor/Claude, and why he believes the future of support is multi-agent, with humans and AI agents working side by side across channels. Plane’s ambition is to become the orchestration layer, giving teams the building blocks to assemble a support system that actually fits how their business works. If you’re a designer flirting with founding, a founder trying to build a company without disappearing into perfectionism, or anyone building B2B SaaS right now, you’re going to enjoy this conversation.

Luke Wroblewski (Sutter Hill Ventures): The VC Who Pushes Pixels and Writes Sales Decks

In this episode of The Design VC, Andy Budd sits down with Luke Wroblewski, one of the early pioneers of UX and interaction design, now Managing Director and Head of Product at Sutter Hill Ventures. Luke’s led design at Yahoo and Google, founded two startups that were acquired by Twitter and Google (Bag Check and Polar), and today works hands-on with companies from the earliest “blank page” stage through to scale. Luke takes us back to the truly early web, starting at NCSA Mosaic, then eBay, then Yahoo in the Web 2.0 era, where he found himself redesigning the Yahoo front page, running dozens of bucket tests at once, and learning what “scale” actually feels like when nobody wants to make a decision. From there, we get into the founder chapters. Luke shares how he financed the leap from a cushy big-company job into startups, what an Entrepreneur-in-Residence actually is, and why he deliberately left the fancy Sand Hill Road office for a scrappy corner desk because startups need urgency, not comfort. We dig into Bag Check’s Web 2.0 social commerce thesis, why Twitter acquired the company (hint: infrastructure mattered as much as product), and the harder truth behind acquisitions: the goal is always to build a standalone business, but the path is full of forks where you choose the best option on the table. Then we go deep on the stuff most designers and founders quietly struggle with: the myth that “if you build it, they will come,” why PR and distribution matter earlier than you want them to, and the moment you realise your job as a founder becomes contracts, negotiations, and sales motions, not making the product. Finally, Luke explains how Sutter Hill works today: extremely high-touch, deeply hands-on, and heavily focused on finding exceptional people rather than obsessing over ideas. We talk AI, the accelerated pace of building, and why Luke’s advice is simple but uncomfortable: you’ve got to jump in and learn by doing, because the shift is moving faster than most people expect.

Irene Au (Khosla Ventures): From Leading Design at Yahoo & Google to the Original Design VC

Irene Au is one of those rare people who helped shape modern product design from the inside, then took those lessons into venture. In this episode of The Design VC, Andy Budd sits down with Irene, who was Yahoo’s first interaction designer, went on to help scale design at Google, and later became a partner at Khosla Ventures. We talk about what it’s really like being “design #1”, how you build credibility inside engineering-heavy organisations, and what has to change as you scale from a handful of designers to hundreds. Irene shares the practical reality of hiring, building trust, and creating systems that help design influence product direction early, not just polish the UI at the end. We also dig into what changes when a design leader steps into venture. What founders actually ask for, what investors pay attention to, and why so much of great product work comes down to culture, incentives, and decision-making, not taste alone. And because Irene has a long-standing mindfulness practice (and wrote Designing Venture Capital), we also talk about the inner game of leadership: how to stay clear-headed under pressure, and why self-awareness might be one of the most underrated founder advantages.

Tracy Osborn (TinySeed): Why Most SaaS Companies Don’t Need VC, and What Works Instead

It might surprise some listeners to hear that, as a VC, I spend a lot of my time encouraging founders to think twice before taking traditional VC money. Not because VC is “bad”, but because it comes with a very specific deal. Most VC funds are built to chase unicorn outcomes, and only a small number of startups can realistically deliver that. Meanwhile, plenty of founders would be better served building something different: a durable, profitable SaaS business that can grow to 30, 50, even 100 people, and create a genuinely great outcome without ever needing a billion-dollar exit. The problem is, that kind of business usually doesn’t fit the classic VC model. Which is why I loved my recent conversation with Tracy Osborn from TinySeed. We talk about seedstrapping, the middle path between bootstrapping and venture. Rather than optimising for unicorns, TinySeed focuses on investing in and supporting SaaS companies that don’t need to swing for the fences to be a success. The goal is simple: give founders enough capital and support to survive the slow early stage, reach profitability, and then grow steadily on their own terms. Tracy is a great guide here because she’s lived it. She started as a designer in the Y Combinator orbit, built a company in the wedding planning space, ran it for nine years, and learned the hard truths of bootstrapping, churn, and survival when the business has to earn its keep. In this episode we unpack what seedstrapping actually is, why it can work financially, and what it changes about how you build. If you’re building SaaS and feeling the pressure to “raise or die”, I think you’ll find this conversation really clarifying.

Marty Ringlein (Agree): Manufacturing Serendipity, Getting Acquired Twice, and Taking on DocuSign

In this episode of The Design VC, Andy Budd sits down with his old friend Marty Ringlein for one of those conversations that’s equal parts entertaining and genuinely useful. Marty has a rare career arc. He started by building an agency, nclud, that ended up being acquired by Twitter. He then founded an events company, nvite, that was acquired by Eventbrite. Along the way he turned angel investing from a side hobby into a proper venture fund. And now he’s back building again, with Agree, taking on DocuSign by rethinking what the end of a contract should actually do. What links all those chapters is a really specific skill: Marty is brilliant at manufacturing serendipity. He knows how to put himself in the path of the right people, at the right moment, with the right story. We dig into the early days of South by Southwest, including the small, scrappy decisions that unexpectedly put nclud on the radar of Apple, and how a potential Apple acquisition changed the dynamics enough that Twitter ended up buying the company. We then jump to nvite, where Marty saw an early shift in how events would work online, built a product that made RSVP and checkout feel effortless, and then used a mix of relationships, timing, and just enough competitive tension to help pull the Eventbrite acquisition across the line. From there, we switch perspectives. Marty shares what changed when he moved from founder to investor, what he now looks for in startups, and why he has a strong bias towards founders who understand distribution, brand, and craft, not just product and code. And finally, we bring it back to the present. Marty walks through Agree, the company he’s building now, and why he thinks “signature plus payment” should be a single flow. It’s a classic Marty move: take a familiar category, spot the missing piece, and then hustle distribution in a way that feels more like clever guerrilla marketing than polite SaaS growth. If you’re a founder who wants a clearer view of how to get noticed, how acquisitions really happen, and how to make luck a little less random, you’ll love this episode.