From designer to founder: The leap we don’t talk about
Designers admire founders, but they don’t see themselves as founders. We are taught to focus on craft, to wait for an engineer, to avoid business.
But the landscape has changed.
AI lets us prototype and build faster than ever. Business skills can be learned. Vision and taste are already our strengths.
This evening brings together two talks for designers who are ready to take up more space.
Schedule
5:30 Doors open
6:00 Talks begin
7:00 Mingle
8:00 Event ends
Confessions of a character whisperer
Domenique Sillett Buxton didn't set out to be a character designer. But somewhere between designing a t-shirt and seeing her characters on the Las Vegas Sphere, she discovered that characters without meaning are pretty forgettable. In this talk, she'll share what she's learned across years of building characters that stick — from Astro and Codey at Salesforce to Dewy at Workato. Expect real stories, hard-won lessons, and a reminder of why the work we make can outlive any brief, any product, or any campaign.
From designer to founder: The leap we don’t talk about
Kathy Wang is the co-founder of Press Club, an AI agent that's helped founders land press in outlets like TechCrunch, Fortune, and Axios. She's also a designer by training, and has previously worked at Dropbox (where she scaled a product from $0 to $1.2 million in ARR) and IBM (where she won the Red Dot: Best of the Best design award). If even one person walks out believing they're allowed to build the future, it will have done its job.
Thank you to our host: Workato
Workato delivers enterprise infrastructure for the agentic era, redefining iPaaS and helping enterprises unify data, applications, processes, and AI into a single, governed platform. A leader in Enterprise MCP and orchestration, and trusted by half of the Fortune 500, Workato’s cloud-native architecture connects every application, data source, and process to power real-time orchestration at scale. With enterprise-grade security and continuous innovation at its core, Workato provides the trusted foundation for organizations to automate with confidence and operationalize AI across the business. You can explore Workato's end-to-end capabilities in our developer sandbox here.