Before I worked with him, I had met good designers. People who are the absolute best when it comes to interaction design, the kind who would sit and think through every possible way you can interact with a component on screen. Then there are people who are brilliant at visual stuff but have no idea about basic interactions. And of course, there are people really good at the product design stuff: thinking holistically about why a feature is built, what it does, what kind of things you should ship. Almost working like a pseudo PM. If you look at fidelity, there are different levels you can work with. Low, mid, high. I’ve worked with people who are now designers at tier-one companies who refuse to turn their mid-fidelity wireframes into visual designs. They rely on a design system and expect some visual designer to turn their concepts into reality. They don’t want to worry about margin and padding.

But Vaibhav? He’s the guy who would be jamming with you on a whiteboard on very complex user problems. From concept to different levels of fidelity to pulling ideas from completely different domains to shape the product.

I have a similar interest in design. I’ve read dozens of books on product design, branding. I spend time on Midjourney figuring out abstract ideas. I like sitting on Figma doing random posters. But I am probably 60% of everything. And you can’t get to a tier-one product by being 60%.

But I know what needs to be done. I’ll sit on Google Stitch and iterate multiple designs for a product card. I’ll use Claude Code and iterate on a dozen different ideas for a homepage. Style transfer is pretty easy with AI now. In today’s age, I don’t think you really need to sit on Figma and grind out every detail. It’s very easy to move between fidelity levels. You can jam with Claude, build a skill around how to think through branding, open up the branding guidelines of five great companies: Wise, Square, Klarna, whatever. Figure out how they do typography, how they’ve done colors, how they think through the brand. You can study how other great brands have been built, what they stand for, and come up with what you want the user to feel when they use your app and what kind of users you want to attract. But even though I have the ideas, it is very hard for me, as someone who is probably not even 60% when it comes to branding, to produce the actual artifacts.

BTW Gojek had one of the best brand books ever. Kudos to Abhinit and gang who came up with it.

When I talk to designers now, they are rigid. They want to do only interaction design. They don’t want to think about working on, say, your logo because they think it’s a different skill, a different craft. And sure, they should focus on being spiky in one dimension. But the reality is that roles are compressing. Even though you need 99th-percentile talent and skill across all these things, in the early stage, you want people who do everything.

Forget early stage when we were a public company, Vaibhav was working on killer decks for the product features we shipped.

And that is what I really miss.

I miss working with someone who would be excited about jamming on an idea late at night. Someone who has the taste and agency to turn it into a wireframe where you can jam more on a specific direction. Then the taste and the craft to bring it to life. And more than all of that. Someone who doesn’t think creating a deck to highlight a feature is beneath them because they’re now “Head of Design.”

There are very, very few people like that. Trust me, I have tried. The only other designer who came close was another designer who was even better in terms of craft. But for some reason, he was insanely hard to work with. One of those mega-talented people (with extremely bad people skills) who are just difficult to collaborate with. But Vaibhav was a gem of a person to be around too. Kind. Happy to give more than he takes. So it becomes very hard to compromise.

So yeah. This long rant is really about one thing: we need a tier-one designer.
 We raised one of the biggest seed rounds in India last year. Backed by tier-one VCs. We’re building a product in the prediction market space. Initially remote, but happy to discuss relocation to Dubai. We’re willing to move for the best talent. Happy to pay the best salary — but it depends on where you are on the experience curve, the skill curve, and what you bring to the table. The more skills you have, the more willing you are to push yourself, the better. We grind a lot. So we expect you to also.

That’s why this is a cultural fit only if you’re the kind of person who likes trying out the latest design tools the day they launch. Someone who keeps a mood board for typography, designs, colors. Who loves spending time on Cosmos. The kind of person who tried Variant AI the day it dropped. Not the kind of person who rates themselves 5 out of 5 on interaction design with no proof of work to back it up.

And definitely not someone who thinks building a deck or spending 15 minutes on Figma to create a hiring post is beneath them.