“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains or the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.“

                                                                                         Steve Jobs          

 

I was fortunate to meet Steve Jobs at a beer & pizza chat while I was a student at Standord Business School in 1994. I remember another one of his quotes that night: “Design is not a democracy”.

This was heresy to me. I had started my career in the Marketing department of Procter & Gamble, where the color of the label of a bottle of shampoo is debated in 3 focus groups before a 6 month test market.

15 years, 4 start-ups later, I have come to fully respect the importance of this special breed of talented people who, to use Sartre’s word, “create not only the real, but the possible”.

Nicolas Vandenberghe, CEO