WELCOME TO

The Design Collective

We're a group of experienced design and product leaders turned angel investors. We’ve written books and given countless conference talks about the power of design, while running design operations at some of the best known companies on the internet; companies like Google, Twitter, Etsy and AirBnB. In a time of high consumer expectations, we believe that well-design products provide a significant competitive advantage. That’s why we invest in products, founders and teams who care deeply about design.

A few of our members

Why take investment
from us?

Founders like to engage with The Design Collective because they’re looking to add design and product expertise to their advisory board or cap table. They’re looking for an advisor or investor who can help them perfect their product, scale their design and product function and grow their acquisition, activation, retention and recommendations through product led growth.Many of the designers (and design adjacent) members of our group are former founders in their own right, so deeply understand the challenges of taking a new product from 0-1. They can advise on everything from early stage product strategy, pricing, go to market strategy and product market fit, to hiring your early design team and raising your first institutional investment. Others have led the design and product through IPO (and everything in between), so understand how to scale the product function, raise successively larger rounds of investment and deliver a killer roadshow pitch. We even have a few designers tuned VC on the team who can advise on everything funding related.

What we invest in

As a group of individual investors we have a fairly broad set of categories we like to invest in. Some of our members around focused on purposeful businesses run by under represented founders, while others are super excited by cutting edge tech like AI and crypto. Some like to invest solely in their home regions (mostly Europe and the US at the moment) while others like to specialise in emerging markets. However sectors which remain popular across the board including the usual suspects of SaaS, marketplace, healthcare and fintech, along with anything targeting design or product people directly.

Send us your pitch

If you’re a founder looking to get advice or investment from an experienced design or product focussed angel, please drop us a copy of your investment memo or deck, or let us know what other help you might need.

Joining The Design Collective

We’re always interested in supporting design and product focussed angels (as well as their design adjacent friends) on their angel investing journey. Our mantra is "helping designers move from getting a seat at the table to getting a place on the cap-table". So if you’re interested in helping create a new generation of design led businesses, please do get in touch.The main criteria for membership is that you’re an active angel investor with an interest in product design, have made at least a couple of investments the past year, are happy to share your deal flow with a bunch of like minded individuals and join the occasional syndicated deal.While the bulk of our members are former designers and product leaders, we also have members who have founded well designed product companies, led marketing, community or growth at such companies, or simply have an appreciation for the business impact of design.

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