Venture Design — London

Alex Daish

I like to use my imagination to solve problems in exchange for money.

I build startups from scratch inside Founders Factory, one of Europe's leading venture studios. Over eight years I've generated dozens of venture concepts, validated them through real-world experiments, and helped launch companies that went on to raise external venture capital. Some are still growing. A few didn't work. One involved cats.

0
Ventures greenlit
2018 – 2026
0
Concepts explored
(est.)
£0
External capital
raised

Things I helped exist.

Each of these started as a blank page. My job was to find the problem, validate that someone would pay to solve it, design the product, and build enough to prove it could work.

View all 39 ventures →

Find the problem.
Prove it matters.
Build the thing.

Venture design is not ideation. It's a structured way of killing bad ideas quickly and giving good ones the evidence they need to survive.

01

Find a problem worth solving

Start with a market, not a solution. Interview real people. Map where money is being wasted, time is being lost, or pain is being tolerated. The opportunity lives in the gap between what exists and what should.

02

Validate before you build

Design experiments that test the riskiest assumptions first. Landing pages, concierge MVPs, fake doors, Wizard-of-Oz prototypes. Spend days, not months, learning whether anyone actually wants this.

03

Build the first version

Design and ship something real. Not a pitch deck — a product. Enough to get paying users or enough evidence to raise a round. Then hand it to a founding team who can take it further than I can.

Where I've done this.

2017 — Present

Venture Design Lead

Founders Factory, London

Lead the design and validation of new ventures across sectors including health, climate, education, fintech, and consumer. Work with corporate partners to identify venture opportunities at the intersection of corporate assets and unmet market needs. Responsible for taking concepts from blank page to funded startup.

2014 — 2017

Strategist & Designer

AKQA, London

Strategy, UX, and creative work for brands including Nike, Rolls-Royce, and Google. Learned how large organisations think about product, experience, and innovation — then went somewhere smaller to actually do it.

2011 — 2014

Getting Started

Various, London

Design and strategy roles across agencies and in-house teams. Figured out what I was good at. Figured out what I wasn't. Both were useful.

Things that don't fit
on a LinkedIn profile.

Let's talk.

Building something and need someone who's done this before?
Or just want to argue about whether memes count as a creative discipline?