About

I’m a creative director. Right now I lead brand, visual identity, and the founder funnel at Founders, Inc. I work on the programs that decide which builders end up on campus — Blueprint, Off Season, Artifact, Canopy — and on the visual systems that make each one feel like its own thing.

Before that I was head of design at buildspace. I ran the design for Nights & Weekends, a six-week school that grew from 700 builders to 70,000 over six seasons. I named the houses and drew the unicorn. I made the posters, the wallpapers, the acceptance assets, the slide templates. Most of the visible language of n&w came out of that stretch.

Before buildspace, I started an edtech company called Quze, where we created proof-of-learning consensus algorithms and the first decentralized credentialing platform. Prior to that, I was at Microsoft for a few years out of school — cloud consulting on Azure, then UX consulting on Modern Apps.

I grew up in India, moved to Chicago when I was 14, and studied computer engineering at UIUC. I spent a chunk of my 20s backpacking around the world. I live in San Francisco now, and still spend one or two months a year in India.

I design, I write, I code, I lead teams. The throughline across all of it is the same — I’m most interested in the moment a piece of work stops being a thing you made and starts being a thing other people want to belong to. Most of my best work has been some version of that handoff.

The fastest way to reach me is @stavanpatel on X. Email is fine too — stavanp@icloud.com. I check it once a week.