Product Designer

Hi! I’m Tom Creighton, Head of Design at Venue. I’m looking for a self-starting, thoughtful designer that wants to build the future of meetings for cool remote-first companies like Shopify, Yelp, and many more. We’d love to work with someone who’s worked in product before and has some live, shipped apps out in the world.

Our product

We believe that the remote companies of the future will be focused on producing experiences – not just another meeting – to inspire and engage their teams. Our software platform gives culture-obsessed companies the tools they need to easily turn their recurring rituals - like All Hands, Town Halls, Executive AMAs, and more - into enjoyable, interactive livestreams.

We create the environment to host these next-level ways to connect, as well as the toolset to help our creators engage with their team with video, screenshares, chat, app embeds, music, emojis, and so much more.

About me

You’ll be working with me on projects as diverse as creating new tools, fine-tuning the attendee experience, or rethinking our public-facing website. I joined the Toronto tech community in 2010 (after a previous career in design agencies) and since then have worked on interactive products you might have interacted with in your day-to-day life, including Shopify, Wealthsimple, and more – both leading product design teams and working hands-on on to ship great experiences.

About you

You’re a product designer who’s excited to work at an early-stage startup – you’re comfortable with taking direction from design, product, and engineering and turning it into fully realized, high-fidelity designs that meet functional and business goals. You know that clear communication is important (especially on remote teams!) and that good copywriting skills are a design superpower. You’re very familiar with modern design tools like Figma and are ready to dive right in.

Our team

You’ll also get to work with our small and scrappy team. Some of the folks you’ll work with directly are our lead engineer, Pei, who was a co-op at Wealthsimple before starting a couple of his own tech companies. Danilo (our CTO) led a number of engineering teams. Frank grew a successful startup in Singapore before rejoining the Toronto startup ecosystem. And our CEO Jason worked on many different parts of Wealthsimple’s business as it grew. We can’t wait for you to meet everyone!

Our funding

Venue is backed by Y Combinator (YC) as part of the Winter 2022 batch. Other notable early-stage YC investments include Airbnb, DoorDash, Stripe, Instacart, Dropbox, and Coinbase.

Working at Venue

We are trying to make a fun product and have fun building it together. We love when our clients are amazed and inspired by our new features – we love direct feedback and encourage our clients to influence our roadmap – while also keeping bandwidth to work on initiatives that we as individual contributors think would have a great positive impact.

We started as a remote company and plan on staying that way. We work wherever we feel most productive.

Each week, we have our own recurring ritual on Venue – we call it “Total Access Live” and a different VJ (that’s what we call people who work at Venue) hosts the show and updates us on the business.

At Venue, we are building products for a diverse world and we need a diverse team to do that successfully. We very strongly encourage applications from everyone regardless of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.

Next steps

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, we’re going to ask for just a couple hours of your time so we can get to know each other:

• First off, share your portfolio so we can get a sense of what you’ve worked on and where.
• 30 minutes with me for a relaxed conversation on your background, experience, and how you’d like to learn and grow with us.
• 45 minutes with myself and another team member for a ‘collaboration’ pairing session to understand how you tackle and solve problems (this is a ‘design exercise’, but you don’t need to prepare, and there are no wrong answers!)
• 30 minutes with Jason, for a chance for us to give you our “sales pitch”, and your chance to ask hard questions about our business.

Contact me with an introduction, portfolio and whatever you think will help me assess if we could be a good fit for each other. Looking forward to hearing from you!