“Are you ready for this book??” That’s the provocation on the back cover of The Universal Traveler, one of my favorite books. Written by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall, two design professors at Cal Poly, and first published in 1970, The Universal Traveler is part self-help manual, part treatise on creativity, part design workbook. There are charming sections on things like, staying open to “off-the-wall” ideas in Brainstorming (capitalized) sessions.

I was introduced to it as an engineering grad student at Stanford in the 90s. At the time, design was one of the lesser disciplines in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs hadn’t yet returned to Apple to begin his historic tear of design-centric product launches. IDEO had only been founded a few years prior. And David Kelley hadn’t yet codified and made famous the methodology known as a design thinking. Design was the “skin” that an agency was hired to slap on the real work of the engineers, to make a product more palatable for the fish-headed masses.

About a decade later, after my run as a product designer at IDEO—at a time when product designers were thought of as the J.V. engineers—I went back to Stanford for my MBA. I went to business school because I wanted to start my own company, but working as a designer hadn’t given me the tools to do so.

Jump ahead a dozen more years—a few startups, a couple of IPOs, more than one career, and three kids later—and, from where I sit, there’s never been a better time for anyone to start a company.

I’ve never witnessed more innovation or faster acceleration of technologies and new business models. Nor has there ever been more ready access to risk capital, or better access to business and engineering leadership. But in too many of the young companies I meet, there remains a crucial seat at the startup table that still needs to be filled.

VCs like me are used to asking, Who is your technical or business cofounder? But some of us have also started to ask, Who is your design cofounder? Technical cofounders and business cofounders will always have their place, but I believe designers are now poised to demand equal footing. Because to build truly enduring companies, having a great programmer or engineer or marketer is no longer enough. You also need a great design lead.

VCs like me are used to asking, Who is your technical or business cofounder? But some of us have also started to ask, Who is your design cofounder?

Unfortunately, designers, by and large, aren’t any more prepared to launch their own companies than I was when I first started my MBA. I’m not saying an MBA is necessary, but entrepreneurial designers do need business fluency, in addition to design fluency. Leadership and collaboration skills, in addition to creativity and individual talent. And a willingness to be not just the protector of aesthetics—but the integrator of aesthetics, technology, and values. Having walked this path myself, I can tell you that there are no handrails and it won’t be easy. Quite frankly, the course will be arduous and most won’t have the nerve or perseverance for it. But for designers and design-sensitive individuals, this is the most powerful way to make a difference.

It’s a journey. A creative expedition. To reinvent yourself from a designer to a designer founder. To build your startup into a design-centric organization. To create processes for creating great things. To remake the world for the better. And I’ve written this book to help you find your way.

Since I believe each entrepreneur’s journey is unique, consider The Way to Design more compass than map: guiding first principles to point you in the right direction. I think of this work as an intellectual descendent of The Universal Traveler. But whereas that book promised to act as “a general guide to behaving creatively in a fast-changing world,” The Way to Design is intended to serve as applied wayfinding for a particular type of creative actor—the designer founder—who wants to shape that world, one which is utterly changed and radically more complex than the one in which Kolberg and Bagnall were writing.

Now, it’s important that you understand the context in which you’ll be operating. So, let’s orient ourselves for the trek by tracing how design came to be so important. And then, if you’re interested, I’ll direct you to the trailhead.

The Last is Now First

Until very recently, success in Silicon Valley required focusing almost single-mindedly on an organization’s technical prowess. It meant having an unimpeachable technical founder, 10X engineers, a relentless devotion to computing dominance. What truly mattered about consumers’ interaction with technology was that it be fast. Expending valuable time on anything else—particularly design—was evidence of distraction from the real work of the company.

Years ago, when Larry Page was asked what Google’s design aesthetic was, he replied, “Pine,” referring to an old command line email program that was known primarily for its speed. And when we look at the origin stories of established tech giants like Intel, Microsoft, and Amazon, they’re stories of business executives and engineers. Design was an afterthought.

But things have changed dramatically in just a few short years. Industry giants, like Samsung, GE, and IBM, have spent hundreds of millions to build in-house design studios and hire thousands of designers. Google has invested heavily to reinvent itself as a design-centric business. Highly lucrative new companies—including Airbnb, Tumblr, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram, and Pocket—have sprung from the minds and hands of trained designers. While other billion-dollar companies, like Slack, have been built by offering better designed experiences with familiar technology. More designers, like myself, have become investors. At Foundation Capital, my venture capital firm, we’ve backed Designer Fund, the first and only investment fund focused solely on designer-founded startups.

That’s because most of the industry has come to understand a new truth about modern business: more and more, design comes first, and is now as indispensable as technology.

Three things are responsible for this remarkable shift. First, whether you’re working on hardware or hosted software, the underlying technology to prototype, produce, and launch products has only become better, cheaper, and faster over the last 25 years. Free and easy-to-use CAD software, 3D printing, and crowdfunding have made it easier and faster than ever to design, sell, and ship. Where, once, engineers used to rely on raw programming languages to create software, today, they build from open-source libraries and pre-existing technology platforms.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the OSI stack, network speeds have gone from one gig to 10 gigs to 100 gigs. But we’re approaching the limits of optical lithography—the sheer physical constraints of how much we can fit onto a chip—and thus an end to the noble metronomic march of Moore’s Law. (One prominent engineer calls this “computer architecture’s midlife crisis.”)

Even assuming we eke out another decade and then make the leap to quantum computing, it remains the case that the most fundamental software infrastructure has become commoditized to the point where most of the innovation is now created at the interface with end users.

The most fundamental software infrastructure has become commoditized to the point where most of the innovation is now created at the interface with end users. In the consumer internet world in particular, the marginal cost of software is zero, and design is now the differentiator.

In the consumer internet world in particular, the marginal cost of software is zero, and design is now the differentiator. “The expectation for a new company is so much higher now,” Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia said to me, “because what they did in six months [10 years ago] someone could do now in a week.” And therefore, “People have to come with more value.”

The second reason that design has moved center stage is that consumer expectations have evolved. Businesses, even in the very recent past, weren’t doomed to certain failure because of a weak emphasis on design. The bottoms of drawers across the free world are littered with poorly designed products that sold well because of brilliant sales and marketing. (If you don’t remember or were too young for it, go check out the “Microsoft re-designs iPod packaging” parody video from a decade ago.) But the public has come to expect more. Thanks to the work of visionaries like Bill Moggridge, David Kelley, and Steve Jobs, people want user-devoted, frictionless experiences in their interactions with technology.

Jobs’ influence is especially pronounced. Perhaps no single product has reshaped what people expect of designed technology more than the iPhone. Ever since its release a decade ago, consumer demand for useful, beautiful product experiences have grown more insistent. You can follow the trail of Palm’s death crawl all the way back to its CMO saying, “Design is a commodity.” Even developer expectations for better design have heightened. At Particle.io, a user-friendly platform for building IoT applications, Jon Logan and Richard Whitney told us that developers tolerate bad experiences “only when there’s no other option.” And they’ve found that customers often come back to their better-designed product after having awful experiences with competitors.

Seek and You shall Design

The final reason that design has become essential is that its scope and meaning have changed. When most laypeople hear the term “design,” what comes to mind are things like a Dieter Rams stereo receiver, a Noguchi coffee table, one of the homes featured in Dwell, a Giugiaro concept car, maybe a well-turned brand logo. I’m a craftsman at heart and I honor this form of design. But “design” has come to mean much more than craft.

John Arnold, perhaps the originator of the design movement at Stanford, taught a course called “How to Ask a Question.” His belief was that “Each of man’s advances was started by a question….Knowing what questions to ask and how to ask them is sometimes more important than the eventual answers.” That’s what design is at the most profound level, and what I’m talking about when I talk about design in this book. It’s not aesthetics. It’s knowing what questions to ask and how to ask them, be it about a small product or a planetary system.

I met designer founder Nate Weiner at a design event at Stanford and later invested in his startup. When I interviewed him for this project, Nate told me that, at his company Pocket, the automatic retort to any questions regarding feasibility is, “Anything is a possible.” Because, “Can we do this is? is the wrong question to ask. It’s, Why should we do this? How should we do this?…It doesn’t matter what ideas you have, it’s all about, Does this solve the problem?”

Design is The What. What should you be building? What’s the right opportunity to go after? What’s the right problem to solve? Asking the right question is half the answer. Design is not about the drapes or the drop shadows. Design is a messy, holistic, human-centric process for solving problems—not just stylistic problems, but problems of all manner and level of importance.

In a world in which you can build anything, the onus for entrepreneurs has shifted from figuring out if you can build something, to understanding whether it’s worth building it in the first place. And that’s why design is now more than the window dressing. Design is The What. What should you be building? What’s the right opportunity to go after? What’s the right problem to solve? Asking the right question is half the answer.

Design is not about the drapes or the drop shadows. Design is a messy, holistic, human-centric process for solving problems—not just stylistic problems, but problems of all manner and level of importance.

At Particle.io, they helped one customer to develop a smart water meter that retrains people’s shower-water usage thresholds through data-informed alerts. “This is a very unglamorous product with huge potential applications,” said Jon Logan, “When you expand this to the scale of hundreds of thousands, you’re talking about massive amounts of water savings. Apply this idea to agriculture and irrigation instead of home use, and you can be smarter about how you’re watering fields for farms in Central Valley.”

Ask Diego Rodriguez, Global Managing Director at IDEO, which airline he thinks is the best design-led and in his opinion it’s not Virgin America, despite the care that that airline puts into things like lighting and pilot’s jackets. “Cool, but that’s all veneer,” he says. Instead, Diego thinks the real design genius in the industry is Southwest Airlines’ co-founder and former CEO Herb Kelleher, who “completely rethought the paradigm of how you get on an airplane.” Kelleher solved an efficiency problem and, in doing so, turned Southwest into one of the safest and only consistently profitable airline in the country.

Another of Diego’s favorite examples is the Uber app. For his money, the best design aspect of the app, isn’t how attractive it is, but the way that it deals away with the awkwardness of the payment transaction. These kinds of solutions aren’t necessarily pretty, but they’re innovative and effective.

This notion of design lines up with the most recent scholarship on creativity, which Scott Klemmer, cofounder and director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego, summed up as, “You need to know the things that you need to know to solve the problem. And you need to not believe things that will get in the way of solving the problem.” Viewed from this perspective, design is about searching out a product’s or an organization’s purpose—the problem it solves—and then painstakingly making sure every facet of the solution supports this purpose. Design is a way of thinking. “I believe in a designer mindset,” said Moxxly cofounder Gabrielle Guthrie, “this approach that you take, regardless of if you’re building products, teams, systems, or cultures.”

Was lost but now I’m a Founder

Where do we go from here? It’s my conviction that the 21st century will be the designer’s century, because I believe that design is the greatest lever for building the greatest companies to come. The most interesting innovation is happening at the top of the stack—at the interface with end users—where technology development intersects with design and where a swipe right or a hold might decide the next breakout business.

To take one example, if you haven’t logged on to Facebook in over 30 days, you’ll get an email that will link you through to your account without need to recall your password. You’ll have 24 hours to re-engage with your friends, which Facebook hopes will lead you to come back more often. This very simple solution—a design solution dubbed “Bypass Login”—of letting you in for 24 hours without a password addresses the very basic human trait of forgetfulness.

Now that is an example of how an established giant has put design to work to give its products an extra edge. And it’s just as applicable in the early stages of product development and in the early life of a startup. Adam Ting, head of design at Blend, a next-gen mortgage startup, reports that “Design has closed deals for us … design is the main reason we’re different. There’s other things we do … but the one readily apparent thing is that the user experience is much better.”

Design has become the primary differentiator for most companies, and it is unlikely that a company founded today will flourish without a robust and thoroughgoing design strategy. As a venture investor, I’ve seen startups fail for a lack of design, and companies that would’ve have been an order of magnitude better if they’d had design processes in place from the very beginning.

Unfortunately, despite how indispensable design is today, a stark gap persists: Not many people running top companies come from design backgrounds. According to the most recent data I could find, only 15 percent of the members of FounderDating claim design as their primary skillset. And, as its former CEO said, once you correct “for people who are more design-appreciators than designers, it’s probably closer to 6 percent.” Yes, there are notable exceptions. But there should be more. And there will be—if designers start seeing themselves more often as entrepreneurs. As the builders not just of products, but of companies. Leaders not just of design but of people. Designers must embrace the entrepreneurial spirit.

When I left Stanford and began my career in product development I was set up with a $15,000 workstation and a $20,000 CAD package sold by expensive sales reps and accompanied by a one-week training course in Boston. My prototypes cost $50,000 and were made in machine shops on equipment that ran upwards of half a million dollars. When we were ready to release for mass manufacture, we sent drawings and, in some cases, 3D files to toolmakers who spent 12 weeks hogging out hardened steel tools that cost no less than $100,000 per part.

Slowly, my product would wind its way through the labyrinth of distribution, ultimately landing in retail stores which required their own care and feeding: point of purchase displays, end caps, promotional materials, and, in some cases, training. And for all of this hard work, you might earn 40 points of gross margin, less than the end retailer that served as a shelf and not much more.

Today, 20 years later, you can design a product with the freeware version of SketchUp, make your first rapid prototype on your own desktop MakerBot, raise $100,000 in crowd-funding on Kickstarter, purchase $5,000 soft tools from PCH, set up virtual distribution with Shipwire or Amazon or both, and market and sell directly to your customers off your own website and in your own voice.

The tools really are in your hands now. But the cardinal question that every aspiring designer founder needs to answer before embarking on their entrepreneurial odyssey has changed. It is no longer: Can you build the product? The starting point is now: Why are you building it at all?

When we asked Joe Gebbia what he would say to entrepreneurial designers if he were delivering the commencement address at RISD, he said, “Solve a problem that is personal to you, a problem that you live in. Be married to the problem. Be so close to it that you understand it from the inside out.”

Gabrielle Guthrie founded Moxxly, which is building a better breast pump, precisely because she saw that so many products for women were awful due to the fact that they were designed by people—i.e., men—who weren’t close enough to the problems. “One thing that really resonated,” said Gabrielle, “was a blog post that said, if men had to use breast pumps, they would be quieter than a Prius and look like an iPhone by now.”

Echoing Joe, Nate Weiner’s advice for an aspiring designer founder is,

For Melissa Miranda, who led the interview portion of this project, that something important is climate change and what designers can do to alleviate the problem. “What matters most is finding the leverage points where I can create the greatest impact. The structure is secondary: it might mean a side project today, a startup tomorrow, or a non-profit down the road.”

Evan Sharp was lucky enough to find his The What. “Honestly, Pinterest is just my favorite thing, my favorite product. I just love thinking about it and working on it.” And, like Evan, the true reward for any designer founder who finds the right problem to solve—is that you get to try to solve it: