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David Booth
Co-founder & CEO, On Deck
David Booth, Co-founder and Chairman of On Deck
David Booth is the co-founder and former CEO of On Deck, a leading startup community and education company. Some key facts about him:
- He co-founded On Deck in 2019 and led the company through rapid global expansion, scaling it to $20M revenue in 2021.12
- Under his leadership, over 1,000 startups were founded and launched in On Deck programs, raising over $2 billion.1
- In January 2024, he stepped down as CEO after 5 amazing years, handing the reins to a co-founder.3
- He currently serves as Co-founder and Chairman of On Deck, as well as an Entrepreneur in Residence and Investor at Blackbird Ventures.45
- Prior to On Deck, he held roles at AngelList, Carta, CoinList and was a Venture Partner at Volt Capital.1
- He is a Fellow of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and a Network Leader (scout) for Village Global venture capital.1
Booth has an impressive background, including co-founding apparel label Emberley and founding the Octagon Rail Jam, a major ski and snowboard event in Dunedin, New Zealand.1 He was also awarded the Tech Nation UK 'Exceptional Talent for Digital Technology' Tier 1 visa endorsement in 2016.1
Highlights
This was fun few weeks of interviewing .. so many legends we couldn't include this round, so stay tuned for a second cohort later this year 👀
Just announced the a16z Design Engineer Fellowship 🧑🎨x👨💻
What a remarkable time to be a designer, right?
One day the timeline thinks your vocation is finished. Design is the first casualty. The next, we're so back - design isn't being eliminated, it’s absorbing engineering! The new system primitive.
I can't even begin to imagine the career anxiety, the sense of urgency many are feeling right now.
@pmarca called it the "Mexican Standoff" ... "AI empowers coders, designers, and product managers to believe they can do each other's jobs, eliminating the perceived need for specialized roles"
I won't pretend to know how the chips will fall, but what i do know is — when the frontier of a field is moving as fast as this one, it's incredibly hard to keep up.
There's no curriculum, no playbooks where we're going.
The rate limiter on acceleration becomes how quickly practitioners at the bleeding edge can share information. How do you exchange notes on what worked/didn't in a high trust environment. How you're managing your teams, driving & measuring AI adoption, interfacing with other parts of their orgs off-the-record.
Right now, the practitioners defining what design engineering actually means are scattered across companies. That slows progress and communication.
So, we’re launching this fellowship to connect and bring you together in one place.
We’re looking for Design Engineer fellows who:
— are closing the gap between design and engineering - whether they came through Figma and learned to build in Cursor, or came through React and developed real product sense
— ship real products, not just prototypes - and understand the gap between the two
— hold both truths: AI changed everything and broke things along the way - the security vulns, the unmaintainable codebases, the distance between demo and production, and more
— bring taste, systems thinking, and technical fluency to everything they build
You might call yourself a design engineer, a designer who codes, a frontend engineer with product sense, or something else entirely.
If you’re interested, read more & apply below
We’re accepting applications on a rolling basis.

