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 talk invites designers to see founding as an act of design: shaping product, narrative, culture, and company.

​If even one designer walks out believing they are allowed to build the future, this talk will have done its job.

​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).

​⏰ Schedule

​5:30 Doors open (food will be served!)
6:00 Talk begins
7:00 Mingle
8:00 Doors close

​🙏 Thank you to our sponsors

​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.

Design Buddies is a community where you level up your design career. Land jobs, improve your design skills, and make friends. We have resources, events, design challenges, job boards, fun perks, and more.