DOS Design

Mercoledì 8 e giovedì 9 maggio l'Università LUMSA ha di nuovo ospitato DOS Design, la design company che ha siglato un accordo con il corso di laurea magistrale in Comunicazione, Innovazione ed Experience design per realizzare attività formative dedicate al #design e alla #progettazione. Nella prima giornata gli studenti hanno incontrato Riccardo Monaco e il team di Product Design, mentre nella seconda giornata è stata la volta di Daniele Del Gaudio e Matteo Binci, che hanno parlato di accessibilità, un argomento di grande importanza e attualità. Entrambi gli incontri sono stati coordinati dal prof. Piero Polidoro (presidente del corso di laurea e titolare dell’insegnamento di User experience e Service design insieme al prof. Andrea Caporale) e dal prof. Gianluca Arnesano (titolare del laboratorio di Game design). https://lnkd.in/d7hu79DQ

Some big news: I’m now a full-time general partner at Character and applications are open for Character Labs, our 4-week sprint program for startups. It took 15 years (!) to get to this moment; here's the story: In 2009, at Google, I ran the first Design Sprint. During a 5-day session in Stockholm, we went from sketch to working prototype of the video call software that would become Google Meet. I was stoked about the potential of compressed, focused work sessions. Over the next three years I formalized this 5-day process and ran it with dozens of teams across Google, including Gmail, Search, and Chrome. In 2012, I became a partner at Google Ventures. There, I made radical progress on the Design Sprint because I was able to get in lots of reps and I was working with a phenomenal team, including John Zeratsky. We led over 100 sprints in our five years at GV, with startups like Slack, One Medical, Blue Bottle Coffee, Nest, Uber, 23andMe, Foundation Medicine, and Gusto. In 2016, we published Sprint, and people around the world started running Design Sprints. We continue to be amazed by the stories we hear from inside companies like Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, LEGO, Microsoft, and Tesla. After finishing the book, John and I kept improving the Design Sprint, and we also started developing new sprint methods. I created a framework for multiple teams running sprints in parallel, and used it with  the New York Times, MIT, and Harvard Business School. In 2020, John and I co-founded a VC firm called Character with our friend Eli Blee-Goldman. We started investing in AI startups like Phaidra, Inductive Bio, and Orbital Materials. And again, we made radical progress on sprints—only this time, with new sprint formats, including the Foundation Sprint, Risk Roadmap, Story Sprint, and Pitch Sprint. In 2021, John suggested we apply everything we’d learned to a unique kind of accelerator that would be 100% focused on product-market fit. So—like robot lions merging to form Voltron—we combined our proven sprint formats into a new, 4-week recipe. In 2022, we prototyped this new accelerator with a group of 8 startups. In 2023, we launched Character Labs and led 5 more teams through the program. It worked great, but I’m (obviously) kind of obsessive, so I spent the rest of 2023 tinkering and improving it. So here we are in 2024. I decided to go all-in on Character because I’ve had so much fun these last few years: developing Character Labs, working with early-stage founders at crucial moments, and helping John and Eli as we create a unique kind of VC fund. And, starting now, Character Labs is a twice-yearly program. In my opinion, it is not only the best way to accelerate toward product-market fit, but an incredibly rewarding way to spend 30 days with your team. Applications are now open—so if you’re starting something new and ambitious, I hope you’ll apply today. https://character.vc/labs