Design at AI Startups Series: Lessons from Founding Designer at Vapi

​What does a founding designer actually do at an early-stage startup?

​Founding designer roles are often poorly defined, highly contextual, and misunderstood. Expectations are fuzzy, hiring signals are inconsistent, and the work itself looks very different from company to company.

​In this session, we’re joined by Andrii Mazur, Founding Designer at Vapi, to unpack what the role actually looks like in practice.

​This is a candid, practical conversation for designers exploring early-stage startups, considering their first founding designer role, or trying to understand whether this path is right for them.

​We’ll go beyond surface-level advice and dig into real decisions, real tradeoffs, and real work.

​What we’ll cover

• ​How Andrii got connected to the founder

• ​What the founders were actually looking for at the time

• ​How to think about portfolios that convert for early-stage roles

• ​Features Andrii has worked on at Vapi and the challenges behind them

• ​Shipped work and real constraints

• ​What the day-to-day actually looks like as a founding designer

• ​Designing with ambiguity, speed, and incomplete information

• ​Being open to experimentation without handcuffing yourself

• ​Why design won’t exist in the future the way we know it today

• ​How staying open to new tools, ideas, and approaches becomes a competitive edge

• ​Why taste matters more than tools

• ​Drawing inspiration from art, graphic design, music, marketing, and video

• ​Tradeoffs of taking a founding designer role

• ​What designers should ask before saying yes