What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game

**Aaron** (0:00)
Raphael Schaad is a unique figure in the startup world. He's both a designer and the successful founder of Cron, a next-gen calendar for professionals, which was acquired by Notion and has gone on to become Notion Calendar, which is used by millions of people all around the world.

**Raphael Schaad** (0:16)
Design is not just how it looks, but design is famously, you know, how it works. You see another dimension to the world when you start kind of understanding design.

**Aaron** (0:25)
So today, we'll be chatting with Raphael to learn more about his design process and find out how founders can level up their design game. So, one of the things that I care a lot about is encouraging more designers to become founders, and encouraging more founders to care about design in the earliest days of starting their company. So, who better to have on than Raphael? Thank you for joining us.

**Raphael Schaad** (0:56)
Awesome, excited to be here.

**Aaron** (0:57)
You've made the jump from designer to founder. Why do you think that there aren't more designers out there making that same leap?

**Raphael Schaad** (1:06)
Well, first of all, I kind of think, you know, there should just be more talented people building companies in general, not just designers. But designers actually have something really valuable to bring to the table when it comes to starting companies. To build a product that people, you know, really, really want, I think you need kind of like three things to build a successful product in the company. You need to have something that, you know, desirable, that people want. You need it to be viable. So kind of like you can build a business out of it and you need it to be feasible. You need to be uniquely positioned to actually build it, you and your team, right? And if you think about these three things, desirability, feasibility and viability, kind of has three overlapping circles and you can map them to more traditional disciplines. It's actually design and business and technology. And design is really kind of like, you know, back to the YCE ethos, make something people want. Design is essentially figuring that out.

**Aaron** (2:00)
It's that mentality that I think a lot of designers think about. What do you think is holding designers back from starting more companies if they're so well suited because it's how they spend a lot of their days and hone their craft?

**Raphael Schaad** (2:12)
Yeah, it maybe kind of goes back almost historically, kind of the context. Maybe back in the day, design was much closer kind of to an artistic pursuit, right? Where art is more about kind of like asking questions, whereas design these days is more actually about kind of problem-solving and answering questions. They're learning solutions basically. And so that probably happened sometimes during the industrialization is my guess, where design kind of moved closer to be part of sort of like the problem-solving, you know, engineering kind of apparatus. But back then in the industrialization, designers didn't necessarily control the means of production, right? And so that is really changing now, where designers can essentially through software, through code, can actually be really close to building the object, right? Versus kind of like, you know, back in the day, maybe it's furniture or like other objects. And so I think that's what makes this moment in time so interesting for designers to build companies and build products.

**Aaron** (3:09)
Yeah. And tell us a little bit about your journey going from designer to founder of your company to ultimately selling it to Notion.

**Raphael Schaad** (3:16)
So I actually have a technical background where I have, you know, I have a law of a kind of like CS degree from back in the day that really allowed me to build things. I never kind of studied CS because I wanted to, you know, go extra deep on that aspect. But really, I wanted it to be a tool for me to build my own designs. And so very much sort of like maker at heart, always had kind of like, you know, dreamed up things, designed things, and then wanted to be able to build in the medium. So I spent my graduate studies at the MIT Media Lab, where I built a lot of physical things. So again, kind of designing things and then building it in the medium that the ultimate sort of like object is in, that's really important to me. And of course, you know, these days where so much is software and so many of the products that have built throughout my career are basically software. Being, you know, capable to prototype, feel, but also sometimes even like build the real thing is sort of like what got me to this technical, you know, education.