Following the exciting trend in venture capital towards becoming full service firms, Lightbank founded their new Lightbank Design program; a 10-week intensive fellowship program that pairs designers up with Lightbank's portfolio companies to consult and assist on branding, UX, UI, and marketing collateral.
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Everyone knows that time moves quickly in the start-up world. But in a newly minted 10-week design fellowship within one of the top start-up venture capital firms in Chicago the time races even faster. Today marked the end of my first week as a design fellow in the Lightbank Design program, and it is hard to believe that only nine weeks remain to work with dozens of portfolio companies. In these next few wild weeks we will be churning out new logomarks, helping to hone burgeoning brands, reworking and testing new interfaces, designing pitch decks to help secure funding for these companies, and picking up new projects as they come up…and in a VC firm with over 60 portfolio companies, new design work comes up all the time.
Lightbank is the venture arm behind such Chicago start-up mega-successes as Groupon and Belly, with dozens of other early to mid level booming start-ups in their portfolio. In mid-December, applications for their new program, Lightbank Design, went live on the web and attracted attention from both start-up press and hopeful young designers. The principal behind the program is simple; what differentiates a good start up from a game-changing startup is no longer development…it’s design. Ashish Rangnekar, founder and CEO of Benchprep (Lightbank portfolio company) summarized the trend by saying, “Design-first is the new product strategy, and designers are essentially the new hackers”. Lightbank represents a small but growing class of venture capital firms that recognize the value of great design in building memorable, sticky brands and are certainly seeing that emphasis on design translate into real financial value as well. Two designers were chosen for the program; Matt Cassity (mattcassity.com) and myself (jessicagandham.com)...
Read all about this week in Lightbank Design on Jessica's blog.
http://jessicagandham.tumblr.com/post/53006576136/lightbank-design-program-off-to-a-great-start
