‘Your best mind energy is right in the morning and right after lunch’: Ben Blumenrose on how to bring creativity into venture capitol

It would be very easy for Ben Blumenrose to buy his nearly 7-year-old daughter a kit to build a Rube Goldberg machine. Instead, he gave her some spent toilet paper rolls, pieces of cardboard, and bits and bobs found around their house. That’s because she’ll need to play, imagine, and pivot with these objects. It’s his way of helping her discover the value of tinkering, an activity that shaped his way of thinking. As a child, he hacked the first video games he bought and figured out how to use his computer to make art. “It was this intersection of design, creativity, technology, and just tinkering,” he says. “That is where I came from.” Ben Blumenrose That intersection still informs where Blumenrose is going. After holding every imaginable design role in his career (working at an ad agency, in-house at CBS, and eventually at Facebook, where he served as lead designer for five years), Blumenrose shifted to venture capital. He is a cofounder and the managing partner of the 14-year-old Designer Fund, which invests in early-stage design-led companies like the payment platform Stripe, the telehealth startup Ro, and the product development tool Linear. We talked to him about his career path, his love of art, and why it’s important to help steer funds toward design and creativity. This interview has been edited for clarity. My background is fine arts. I was the kid drawing in the back of the class and if I was allowed to paint, I’d paint whenever I could. Right around fourth or fifth grade was when computers became a thing you could buy. I was hooked on the idea that I could make art and use artistic skills on a computer. It was a different kind of medium. When I was around 15 or 16 years old, people would pay me to do art on computers. I knew that was the thing I wanted to do. I’ve had every kind of design role you can imagine. My life-changing experience was working at Facebook. I was brought on to be one of the first designers there and to build all of the things they ne