#7 Steve Vassallo @Foundation Capital: Empathy is killing your product
Steve Vassallo is a general partner at Foundation Capital (VC firm that invested in Pocket, Netflix, Uber, etc.). Before that, he worked as a lead designer at IDEO where he worked on a famous Cisco's 7900 series VoIP phone. He recently published a book "The Way to Design", which helps designers become entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs adopt best design practices. You can read the book for free online.
In the episode we talked about:
- why will the 21st century be the decade of design,
- why empathy has become a buzzword and what empathy really is,
- common struggles of designers who want to become entrepreneurs.
Listen to the episode
- You can listen and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play (only in the US) and CastBox.
- You can download the mp3 file by right-clicking here.
Show notes:
- 2:00 How Steve got into design?
- 4:00 How popular was design in the 1990s?
- 5:40 Why is design relevant for business and tech people and why is business important for designers
- 10:44 What do designer founders struggle with the most?
- 13:10 How Steve works with designers to become better founders?
- 16:10 How do good startup teams mix best practices from different disciplines?
- 19:35 How to apply design to think about the business?
- 22:35 Steve's favorite business model
- 25:55 How to start thinking about the business side of an idea?
- 27:45 Why empathy is killing your product (and what empathy really is)?
- 32:50 How do best startup teams gather data?
- 36:40 Steve's decision to get an MBA
- 40:45 How can designers learn about business models?