What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game

Raphael Schaad, designer-founder of Cron (acquired by Notion), argues design taste is learnable and designers are uniquely positioned to build the next generation of companies.

• Cron was acquired by Notion and became Notion Calendar, now used by millions worldwide.
• Schaad holds a CS degree and studied at MIT Media Lab — coding was a tool to build his own designs, not an end goal.
• Designers map directly to the three product requirements: desirability (design), viability (business), feasibility (tech).
• Gary Tan (YC president) called good design in early-stage startups a lost art — Schaad sees this as a massive competitive opening.
• AI shifts design from static nouns (buttons, sidebars) to verbs (autocomplete, summarize, agents) — static prototypes break down.
• Top three design books: Grid Systems, Elements of Typographic Style, The Design of Everyday Things.
• Paper sketching gains value in the AI era: snap a sketch, upload to AI, skip straight to working prototype.
• Design is how it looks, how it works, AND how it’s built — latency and loading states are design decisions.

2025-03-28 · Watch on YouTube