(applause)

I'm going to talk to you a bit about how I relearned

my entire design craft

through the process of entrepreneurship.

To do that, I'm going to take you back a bit.

I remember exactly where I was on July 14, 2002.

It was my thirty-first birthday,

but that's not why it sticks in my mind.

It sticks in my mind because it was the beginning,

I know now,

of a ten-year personal odyssey for me

and the beginning of one of the largest,

steepest learning curves I've had the opportunity to climb.

I was here,

more specifically, I was down there

in the basement conference rooms

at the Universal Sheraton in Los Angeles.

It was the largest gathering of sex-product manufacturers

in North America, perhaps the world.

Welcome to the adult novelty manufacturers expo.

I'm a designer.

I had just recently kicked off

my own independent design consulting firm.

The weirdest thing happened.

Three different people, unrelated potential clients,

came to me and all asked me about the same thing.

What about some sex products?

At first I was a bit taken aback.

I was kind of skirting around the outside

of the conference hall

because in the middle of it

was all the stuff you'd imagine:

big dildos, vibrators, porn stars,

the whole thing.

The products at that time were frightening to look at,

had porn stars in the packaging,

made audacious claims

that they couldn't actually deliver on.

They're made of toxic materials.

Overall, poor user experience.

Sex is incredibly intimate,

incredibly important, and it's a fundamental aspect

of the human experience.

To me, intuitively as a designer,

it seemed that if anything should be beautifully designed

and made and presented,

it's those products that engage our sexuality.

I started sketching.

Then, I launched a company.

I called that company Jimmyjane.

I raised money from friends and family.

When I say friends and family,

I mean my high school buddies, very brave,

and my mom, who put in money.

The first product that we launched, Little Something,

actually there's a collection around this,

but this is the only vibrator in that first collection.

This was designed to be completely opposite

from everything else that had come before

and to make a very big statement about the possibilities

in this category.

It is made out of medical-grade materials,

rather than being toxic.

Here you see it in 24 karat gold, platinum, and steel.

It was also silent,

essentially everlasting because it has a replaceable motor.

By pretty much every metric,

it was moving in the direction of,

I believe, a better user experience.

Fast forward many years,

today Jimmyjane is a leading premium sex-products brand.

We're launching constantly top-selling,

category-defining products into this market.

Let me take you back to 2007,

a couple years after starting the company

to share a turning point and some lessons I learned from it.

In 2007, we had just launched this product, FORM 6.

It was a new flagship for us.

The core technology was cordless charging.

That meant that this was the first

fully-submersible, rechargeable vibrator.

Think about the number of electronics that you have

that are rechargeable and submersible.

There aren't many.

We weren't just changing the technological context

and the design and so on,

we we're also changing the retail context.

This was selling at the Sharper Image.

At the time, Sharper Image was the top retailer

of massagers in the United States.

It was also this product,

the number one premium massager in that category

in that store.

That wasn't the only place we were selling.

We were breaking down barriers all over the place.

We were selling through Louis Vuitton,

their private members club in Tokyo.

We were selling through Nordstrom,

Selfridges, Sephora, Fred Segal in L.A.,

Bed Beth & Beyond, W Hotels worldwide.

Some of these remain our partners to this day.

We did change that media context,

where this conversation around sexuality was happening.

We were the first,

and in many cases the only brand still,

to have been featured in publications like WL,

GQ, Esquire, Wired.

We were on the Today Show.

Finally, FORM 6 making this big splash,

we got what was very important to me personally and my ego:

design awards.

This is what we look for.

This is how I know,

this is how I knew I was doing my job well,

other designers saying good job.

Perhaps nowhere is the business value of design

more apparent than in the context of a startup.

In a startup,

you're starting from essentially a baseline of zero.

There's nothing there,

so everything you create, you can see the effect.

Likewise, there's a very strong signal to noise ratio.

There's not a whole lot else going on in the business.

There aren't all these other effects compounding

and making it difficult to understand the effect.

The cause and effect is very easy to correlate.

On the flip side of that,

nowhere are the business risks of design

more potentially costly or even fatal.

Behind the scenes, FORM 6's launch

was an operational and financial catastrophe.

It was enormously complex to ramp up into manufacturing.

As a result, it was eight months behind

in terms of its launch,

400 percent over budget,

it was selling for almost no margin.

We were behind on our projections,

behind on our deliveries,

we were burning bridges with our partners.

The company was technically bankrupt.

This is why.

When we took it into manufacturing,

it was almost impossible to go through the final step.

There was light at the end of the tunnel

because we were just on the verge,

one signature away,

from closing our next round of financing.

At that exact moment, those investors got cold feet,

understandably, and they walked away.

We weren't standing on the edge of the cliff,

we were off the edge of the cliff,

looking down, and it was a long, long way down.

To make matters a little bit worse for me personally,

I was also essentially bankrupt.

I had invested all of my personal savings

and then quite a bit more into the company

even before we raised our first round of financing.

Compounding this further,

The Sharper Image was soon to go bankrupt,

we didn't know this yet,

but a couple months later they would go bankrupt.

We would never be paid

for the single largest order we had ever received.

Let's not even talk about the stock market crash of 2008.

Just at this moment of Jimmyjane's imminent demise,

I met a wise man, an entrepreneur and a seasoned one.

He said to me: Ethan, do you know the first rule

of starting a company?

Clearly I did not.

No.

He said: don't die.

Now the vast majority of startups break this rule.

I'm here to talk about a particularly tragic cause

of sudden startup death,

which I refer to as design suicide.

We've heard a lot about what designers

can bring to entrepreneurship,

but not nearly enough, I think,

about what entrepreneurship brings to designers.

Design is not a panacea.

It cannot save your business.

Indeed, design can kill it.

Let me share a couple of lessons from my own attempts

at design suicide.

This is actually an image of Jimmyjane FORM 2.

I'd ask you to raise your hand if you have a FORM 2,

but okay there you go. Boom.

We have a winner.

The rest of you are lying.

(audience laughs)

It's a great product,

I designed it with Yves Bahar, who you just saw.

We ran into a manufacturing challenge

with one of my first projects.

My boss at the time came over to me,

looked at what I was doing,

and he said: you need to smell more plastic.

What he meant by that is

that until I spent more time on the factory floor,

I wouldn't really understand the impact

of what I was doing on page

what impact it would have on the actual factory

and the production process, and so on.

He was absolutely right.

When I designed FORM 6 in such a way that as the final step

of the manufacturing process,

we took essentially a completely finished product,

all the electronics, everything,

a lithium ion battery,

put it back into an injection mould

and extremely high pressure

and extremely high temperature

inject liquid silicone over it,

somehow not causing the battery to explode.

It was going to crush about 15 percent of those,

meaning we had an extremely low manufacturing yield.

All those costs need to be loaded back

into the other products that you do get out of the process.

For us, this was nearly fatal.

So, smell the plastic.

In the broader sense,

what this means is for me

I was oblivious of all the various steps needed

between myself and the end user.

I was very familiar at that point

with the development pathline,

but not with all of the other interconnections

in the rest of the business.

We should all know as designers

when I sketch this line

I just saved five percent on the margin.

That's a good thing.

When I sketch his line,

the warehouse guys are gonna have to work an extra day

over the weekend.

And when I sketch this line,

now we need a new certification just to sell into Japan.

Next lesson, many of you have seen this before,

I'm guessing probably from people

who want you to do something good,

but neither cheap nor fast.

The idea here is if you want something cheap and good

it's not going to be fast.

If you want something fast and good,

it's not going to be cheap.

Designers, like myself,

want it to be good, good, good.

The designer in me wants perfection.

With FORM 6, my instinct was the better I make this product,

the better the company will be, obviously.

As a result, FORM 6 was slow,

extremely expensive, and incredibly good.

Startups demand a different definition of perfection.

Fast and cheap are requirements.

They are non-optional.

Time is money.

Money is finite.

Without money, you die.

Here's a different approach

that I took with the later program.

We had a lot of traffic coming to Jimmyjane.com

our e-commerce site,

but a very low conversion rate.

People were coming, not necessarily buying. Why?

I had a couple of theories.

One, they're either looking for something they know

and that's familiar to them and they are not finding it,

or two, they are looking for something that's less expensive

than what we are selling.

Let's design a product.

No, let's go out and find all the iconic vibrators

that everybody knows.

We'll test them to be to our standards

and then we will get them exclusively in white,

package them together into a line

and call them the Usual Suspects.

We designed essentially nothing.

This was fast, a matter of a couple months.

It was cheap, basically only the cost of the inventory,

but was it good?

The test went well.

In fact, it went so well that these products

are still on sale on the Jimmyjane site today,

almost six years after we launched the test.

I think we have the conclusions of that test.

So, choose two, it's a trick question

in the startup environment.

Fast and cheap is good.

We were back in business.

Jimmyjane continued to grow,

but we realized that we were addressing a bit of a niche.

That niche was the very high end.

We needed to grow to reach a larger audience,

to have broader distribution.

We really needed an affordable crowd-pleaser in our line.

The designer in me says: design opportunity.

What can we create?

Rather than going for wholesale innovation,

we turned to this.

This, which I did not design, is a fingertip vibrator.

These are very well-known in the market.

Goes on your finger,

and you can imagine the rest.

You'll find these in your supermarket.

They have a great promise, right?

The idea here is we all know how to explore

and touch and connect with our hands and fingers.

What if we put something on a fingertip

so that now that sensation is amplified.

Great idea.

But they weren't delivering on that promise.

In fact, they were bulky and cumbersome,

so you could not move naturally.

It wasn't natural at all.

Our testers told us the vibration was insufficient.

Good idea, bad execution.

We asked ourselves: can we deliver on this promise for real?

We decided we thought we could.

We focused very narrowly on one thing,

and that one thing was: how do we get as much power

out of as small of a space as possible.

After a lot of engineering work,

we ended up with these vibration pods,

which deliver three-times the power in one-third the volume.

What that does is it gives you a product

that you can wear very naturally on the hand.

It's intuitive, it turns natural touch

into supernatural sensation.

Your hands are unencumbered, so your hands can wander

as hands are wont to do.

It's great for couples, just as an FYI.

We call this product 'Hello Touch.'

And it's been welcoming consumers to the brand

ever since we launched it in the beginning of 2013.

Now unlike FORM 6, this launched on time,

on budget, and with great margins.

In fact, it recouped all of its development costs

within the first six months of sales.

The idea here is this,

new, not necessarily better.

Designers have an innovation bias.

We feel, often, if we don't put something in front of you

that you haven't seen before,

we're not doing our jobs.

The thing to know though is that newness

and business impact aren't necessarily correlated.

What is correlated is newness and risk.

With newness comes unknowns.

With unknowns come risk.

Startups are already risky enough.

They don't need designers adding more on top of that.

Innovate judiciously.

From entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,

I've learned countless lessons about design.

I can boil almost all of these down

to one simple visceral understanding

and that is this,

we need to, in order to bring the most value to startups

and the users that they serve,

keep the business impact top of mind throughout the process.

We can then design the experience

and then get down to the product.

Without that, we're really not designing

in such a way that is sustainable for the company itself.

I'm very proud of the impact that Jimmyjane

and the Jimmyjane team have had

on the sex products industry.

In fact, today the sex products industry

looks a lot more like Jimmyjane than it did before.

There are a lot fewer toxic products,

a lot better representation,

and a very different mentality around this.

The conversation has opened up.

Jimmyjane can't claim sole credit for that,

but I think we've had a huge impact.

Several months after the launch of Hello Touch,

we were approached by a potential acquirer.

After that acquisition,

I had to decide what to do next,

and I knew what that was.

I just didn't know the format yet.

I knew that I needed to leverage design

in the creation of new businesses on an ongoing basis.

I refer to that as venture design.

Today, I am the head of venture design at Frog,

a global design firm.

There, I leverage our capabilities,

our experience and our reach,

and our almost 600 people

in the service of entrepreneurs and we make investments

in the form of services into companies.

To date, we've collaborated with five founding teams

to propel their businesses forward,

always focusing on designing the impact.

Two quick examples of what this might look like,

we we're approached earlier this year by two entrepreneurs,

Bill Gross and Steve Schell,

the co-founders of Idea Shaper.

They came to us with a big vision,

consumer printer, 3D printers for all essentially.

They wanted to do this with: 1) the most affordable printer

at $279 retail,

and 2) it being the easiest to use because of an ecosystem

of also apps and great 3D content for printing.

They came with this prototype,

which demonstrates one of the engineering solutions

that they had that is enabling their lower price.

They had a very specific business objective

in working with us.

They had money.

What they needed to do

was to actually jumpstart their ecosystem.

They needed both printer owners

and content providers to begin working together

as a community to build their ecosystem.

Without the content, why do you need a printer?

Without the printer, what are you gonna do with the content?

We did a six-week sprint with them.

We collaborated closely,

honed their strategy,

renamed and rebranded the company to New Matter.

We designed the first iteration of the physical product,

the digital market placement apps,

and capture the whole story in a video,

a portion of which you are seeing here.

Which we launched on the Indiegogo

for their crowd funding campaign.

The Indiegogo campaign was a wild success.

New Matter is the number one 3D printer on Indiegogo.

But most importantly,

we achieved the impact that they were looking for.

We jump started that community that they needed

by pre-selling over twenty-five hundred printers

and getting those out into the world

and engaging a huge audience of content providers

to now begin creating content for those printers.

I'll leave you with this,

both designers and entrepreneurs

like to reframe every challenge as an opportunity.

As both a designer and an entrepreneur,

the opportunity that I'm pursuing is summarized this way,

I believe that through design we launch stronger startups.

I'm a big proponent of that and I think that many are.

But I think there's another component to this,

which is through entrepreneurship

we also become better designers ourselves.

I'd like to see us spin up this virtuous cycle

and as much as possible

minimize the design suicide, the design fatalities

along the way.

Thank you very much.

(applause)