The challenge

Silicon Valley Bank saw opportunities to serve founders beyond financial products, but early venture ideas were difficult to compare. The team needed a faster and more rigorous way to understand unmet needs, differentiate concepts, and decide which opportunities deserved additional investment. Without shared evidence, the most polished pitch or enthusiastic sponsor could outweigh whether founders actually needed the proposed service.

My contribution

I worked as a software and venture designer alongside IDEO, Silicon Valley Bank, and venture-studio partner High Alpha. Over six weeks, we turned six opportunity areas into evidence the leadership team could evaluate on common terms.

I helped structure and execute the validation process:

• Designed 28 sacrificial Figma concepts that made each proposition specific enough for founders and investors to react to.
• Conducted and synthesized 47 concept discussions with 19 startup founders and nine industry experts.
• Combined user evidence with market size, competitive context, feasibility, and strategic fit in a shared decision framework.

The prototypes were intentionally provisional. Their job was to expose weak assumptions before a team became attached to a product, while still giving participants enough detail to discuss workflows, trust, willingness to engage, and alternatives already in use.

The impact

The research produced clear recommendations: four opportunities should continue and two should be paused. The Fractional Talent concept progressed with High Alpha and launched in 2020 as Bolster, a marketplace connecting startup leaders with experienced executives and board members. Bolster later raised an $11 million Series B and grew a network of thousands of executives and founders.

For Silicon Valley Bank, the work created more than a set of concepts. It established a repeatable way to make venture decisions using direct evidence from the ecosystem, and showed how a lightweight software prototype could connect customer desirability directly to a concrete investment choice with greater confidence.