Christina Cacioppo
Analyst, Union Square Ventures
What were you up to before you came to the d.school?
I had just finished my undergrad degree at Stanford – I came to the d.school as a co-term (finishing my undergrad degree while getting a graduate degree). I was terribly excited to take d.school classes as a grad student after watching from afar as an undergrad.
How did you hear about the d.school? Why did you come?
Still remember this: my sophomore year (2005-06) I heard about the d.school by reading about Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability in the Stanford News Bulletin. The class appealed to me because I had all these thoughts and observations after spending summers in East Africa and Southeast Asia — some good, some less-good — and didn’t know what to do with them. It ended up being design thinking, rather than “just” EDEA, that helped me sort through some of those ideas.
What did you experience when you got here? Why was it meaningful to you?
To me, the d.school experience was all about learning to work in truly multi-disciplinary teams and to rely on a process. Since my sophomore year of college, I’d self-segregated into the social sciences — I dipped out into engineering toward the end, but I led a fairly one-discipline existence. Working with people at the d.school who had different backgrounds, and thought about the world differently, was refreshing.
I found one of the great things about d.school classes is that they are anchored in the hands-on practice of design thinking skills. Today, I’m more comfortable applying design thinking away from Stanford because I got such a strong foundation at school.
What are you doing now? How do you use what you learned at the d.school?
I’m working at Union Square Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm in New York City. We’re all about web or mobile services that have the potential to transform markets — that’s what we look for, invest in, and spend our time talking about. We invest sufficiently early that there’s little financial analysis we can do with great confidence. (How would you have valued Twitter or projected its revenues in 2007?)
Instead, I’ve been able to apply design research and needfinding methods to investment decisions. When making early-stage investments, we’re very concerned about whether a service can grow beyond its initial users. Services that address needs are more likely to do that — and those are insights the d.school taught me methodologies to identify.
