The email arrived at strange time. I was sitting in my apartment in Alanya, looking at the Mediterranean. Late evening, maybe 10pm, when the message came through from our CEO saying the round was closed. Metavallon VC, F10/SIX Group, SICTIC. Seed round, confirmed. I remember I put the laptop down and looked at the sea for few minutes, not really knowing what to feel.
Then I opened Figma and went back to the component I was working on.
That was December 2020. About week ago from when I writing this. I have been thinking since then about what funding actually means for designer, specifically for designer who is only designer at company.
Before the round: the quiet period
I joined VALK in November 2019. At that time the product was not nothing, but it was also not finished. We had clear idea of what we building: platform for tokenizing private assets, institutional-grade, built on R3 Corda. The users are investment banks, hedge funds, asset managers. Not consumer people who need friendly onboarding. Professionals who need information density and trust signals.
For first year, pace was manageable. Small team, clear priorities, I knew what I had to design each week. I was designing data rooms, deal management interfaces, investor dashboards, complex stuff, but focused. I had time to do it properly. Time to think about information hierarchy, about how a fund manager at institution in Switzerland would actually use this screen.
We had calls, we iterated. I was remote in Russia or Turkey when others were in London, which made some things slow, but mostly it worked. I would push frames to Figma, write my reasoning in the comments, and we would discuss on the call.
The product was getting better slowly but clearly. That is good feeling; when you can see the progress in the file, when the components become more consistent, when edge cases stop breaking things.
Then the round closed and everything changed in way that I did not fully anticipate.
The overnight shift in expectations
Nothing in the product broke. The platform still worked. The design system was still valid. But suddenly, certain things that were “fine” became “not impressive enough.”
This is specific phenomenon that I think every designer at early startup eventually experiences. When company is raising, there is presentation layer that matters separate from the actual product. Investors see demos, not real usage. They see specific screens, specific flows. And if those screens do not communicate “this is enterprise-grade, this is serious, this is worth money”, the conversation becomes harder.
I understand this rationally. But it creates strange pressure. You find yourself redesigning a dashboard not because users struggled with it, but because it needs to look more impressive in deck screenshot.
We had one flow, deal discovery, the screen where institutional investors browse available deals, that was functional and tested. Users understood it. But it looked, maybe, like a nice web application. Not like institutional software. After the round closed, there was conversation about making it look more “premium.”
I was uncomfortable in that conversation. We had real feedback from real users that the current design was clear and easy to navigate. Where is the problem exactly?
But I also understood the strategic reality. We now had investors. Investors talk to other investors. We would be showing the product in more formal contexts. The presentation layer is not separate from the product, it is part of how the company is perceived, and perception affects partnership deals, next round, everything.
So I did the work. Redesigned certain screens. Made them more visually substantial. Better data visualization on the dashboards, more considered typography in the deal pages. Honestly, some of those changes were genuine improvements. Some were changes made for the wrong reason that happened to be improvements anyway.
The annoying part was not the work itself. It was that I had been proposing some of these visual improvements for months and the answer was always “let’s focus on functionality first.” After the round closed, same proposals became urgent priority. Funding changed the timeline in ways that had nothing to do with users.
The deck problem
Here is something I did not fully expect when I took this role: how many pitch decks I would design.
As only designer at company, the scope of my work is much larger than “design the product.” I also design everything else, marketing materials, social media graphics, conference materials. And decks. Many, many decks.
Before the seed round, decks were maybe 20 percent of my time. During fundraising period and immediately after, it became closer to 40 or 50 percent. Maybe more.
This is strange position to be in. I spent years developing skills for product design, information architecture, user research, interaction design, component systems. And there I was, spending most of my week in Figma making slides look good. Making sure the logo on slide 7 is positioned correctly. Adjusting the gradient on the “our vision” page.
I do not want to say this work is unimportant. Investors read these decks and they make decisions. I understand that.
But it is disconnect. I signed up to design the platform that institutional investors in 15 countries would use. Instead I was spending days on investor presentation materials that would be used maybe 30 times total.
I mentioned this tension once in a call, carefully, not as complaint but as question about priorities. The response was reasonable: right now, getting the round closed is the most important thing, and every tool helps. After the round, it will change. This was true. The deck work has come down somewhat. But it has not disappeared, and I think it will never fully disappear when you are the only designer.
If I were younger designer considering a role like this, I would think about this carefully. The job description says “product designer” but the actual job is “all visual communication for the company.” Know that going in.
The irony of investor-facing design
Part of the reason VALK was able to raise was the product. The platform looked credible and functional. Investors could see that the technical execution was serious. Our CEO mentioned in the announcement that the product demonstrated real traction and institutional quality.
That product was designed by me. The same me who was then immediately redirected to make decks.
I am not saying this to be bitter, I am genuinely proud that the product work contributed to something real. But it creates interesting circular logic: the design quality helped raise the money, and raising the money immediately added design work that was not about product design.
The thing that got us here is now slightly lower priority than the things needed for next step.
What funding actually enables
I want to be balanced here, because I am aware that I am describing tensions without describing the genuine positives.
Funding means we can build things I have been wanting to build for months. Better reporting dashboards. More sophisticated investor management interface. Improved document handling in the data rooms. Notification systems that actually made sense. These were not small wishlist items; they were genuine product improvements that users had asked for.
Without funding, “later” can mean very long time. With funding, the engineering team grows, the roadmap becomes real. For me personally, this is exciting. I have design specs sitting in Figma for features that have been waiting months for development capacity. Now those features can actually be built. I can work on something and know it will ship.
There is also different kind of creative energy when company has resources. When everything is extremely constrained, every design decision carries weight that can feel exhausting, if we build this wrong, we cannot afford to rebuild it. When there is more runway, there is slightly more room to iterate, to try things, to improve rather than only survive.
Being remote during the celebration
Small observation. When the round closed, our team in London had celebration. I saw the photos in Slack. They went out somewhere, they had drinks, they were together.
I was in Alanya looking at the sea.
I have worked remotely since I was 14 years old, so this is not new feeling. But it is present. The company had real moment and I experienced it through Slack messages and emoji reactions.
I do not think this is tragedy. I chose this arrangement and I appreciate what it gives me. But when the company celebrates, the remote person celebrates alone. Or in my case, quietly, by going back to Figma.
There is also practical dimension. When the team is physically together after big news, conversations happen organically. Priorities get discussed over drinks. Decisions get made in informal ways. When you are remote, you get the official communications but you miss the texture of how people are actually thinking. I have learned to ask more explicit questions in async messages, to surface things that might otherwise just be assumed.
What I am watching now
We are at the beginning of something that will be different from first year. The company has more structure now, more formal expectations, more visibility, more pressure to demonstrate progress.
For me, this means design roadmap that is more connected to business milestones. Feature X needs to be ready before this conference. Dashboard Y needs to look polished for this investor meeting. The product design is still about users, but it is also now about VALK’s position in the market, about what the product communicates to the world about what we are.
I have been at this company for about one year. The next year will look different. More users, more countries, more scrutiny.
What I want to hold onto is the thing that made the product good before the round, the attention to how real users actually work, the willingness to make boring screens functional rather than impressive. Those values do not have to conflict with also making things that look serious and enterprise-grade. The best version is both.
But it requires some resistance to pressure. Someone has to say “this works for users, we should not change it just because it looks less interesting in screenshot.” That is part of designer’s job that nobody tells you about when you are learning design.
You are also the person who defends the design from the design’s own success.
Originally published on kargaev.me. Imported to blog.deeflect.com archive.