Early-stage startups face a specific design problem: limited runway, no designer on staff, and urgent pressure to ship differentiating quality on the way to product-market fit. I advised over twenty Sequoia portfolio startups across product/UX, branding, and design hiring — with hands-on co-creation for about half, including Anterior, Claim, Fleet, HealthLeap, Meeno, Mindy, Sutro, and Traversal.

For Reflect Orbital, I partnered with the co-founders to define a minimum viable brand inspired by old NASA patches and Carl Sagan-era posters — executed fast enough to support their funding announcement. The brand drove 3x growth in customer applications within days.

Millions of first-time vote-by-mail voters in 2020 had no guidance — and the process differed across hundreds of counties. Isabel Tewes and I identified the opportunity over a pandemic Zoom and built a localized instructional app from scratch. I led product design, front-end development, and visual branding; Zac Witte handled back-end, Miki & Gopika Setlur drove social. We set a goal of 100 people voting who otherwise wouldn't have. We think we reached a few thousand.

The Social Good org had grown quickly across five teams — Charitable Giving, Crisis Response, Health, Mentorship, and Civic Action — each with inconsistent visual representations. I reconciled fragmented Charitable Giving icon variants into a single unified logo now used extensively across Meta products, drew the Mentorship logo from scratch, and normalized the broader portfolio. I also created a logo for the Social Good team used in press and internal culture. Many of these marks remain in use today.

Change.org was growing fast but its visual identity wasn't keeping pace with its mission or scale. Working directly with CEO Ben Rattray, I established the brand tenets — timeless, strong, friendly — then directed work across agencies and designers, contributing to symbol selection, palette, and an object-oriented CSS styleguide co-authored with engineering. Change.org became one of the most recognized social impact brands in the world — its visual identity a consistent presence in grassroots campaigns globally. Covered in Brand New. Credit also to agency Instrument and designers Wes Mitchell and Lauren Adams.

Transportation for America needed to move a skeptical, print-native congressional audience on the case for safer streets. I designed their first "Dangerous by Design" reports, synthesizing complex pedestrian fatality data into sharp visualizations with a bold identity built to command attention in a policy context. The report became a cornerstone of T4A's ongoing advocacy — and the 2011 edition prompted Senator Tom Harkin and eleven co-sponsors to introduce the Complete Streets Act within hours of its release, with Harkin citing the report directly on the Senate floor.

The 2008 Obama campaign needed to fund a historic national effort through digital advertising — with no playbook for doing it at scale. I designed the majority of the campaign's online ads, which became its largest donation funnel, raising tens of millions of dollars each month. The work pioneered early A/B testing for political ad design and included the first-ever use of in-video-game ads for a political get-out-the-vote effort.