Design isn’t something you would normally associate with a VC firm. But as more firms are adding value-added services, Google Ventures has created an all-star team of designers from Google, Mozilla and more to help portfolio startups create beautiful and easy-to-use products. In particular, Google offers its portfolio startups the opportunity to participate in a Design Sprint, which is an intensive, visual bootcamp around a design problem for portfolio companies.
We were able to embed ourselves in one of these recent sprints, in which a few members of the Google Ventures Design team were helping CircleUp, a startup that connects investors with retail and consumer companies that wouldn’t attract traditional venture funding. The entire process, which would normally take six months for a startup to work through, is compressed to five days (hence the word “sprint”), and starts with the design team spending time with the startup’s product and engineering teams to understand the problem and challenge.
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