#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?