Mercato

🛫 Assuming all flights stay on track, we're off to ORD for Tech Week Chicago where we're hosting a table at the Capital Summit poker night and a founder and funder breakfast as part of our Sunrise Startup Series! The team will also be heading to the PNW to meet with ecosystem founders and friends (and hopefully escape the heat) ☀ If you're planning to attend #TWC, we'd love to meet up! Drop us a comment below.

Effective communication and collaboration are essential for designers, who must articulate the value of design beyond aesthetics. This includes managing feedback effectively and aligning design decisions with business metrics and objectives. This alignment includes understanding how feedback should differ at each of the five different stages of design: ▶ Strategy ▶ Scope ▶ Structure ▶ Skeleton ▶ Surface Not sure where your feedback should be focused? Any easy way to ease into this is to ask what kind of input would be most useful based on where you are in the process, and focus on intent when giving feedback. Better yet, attend a design review meeting and try using only questions, no statements. #mercatocompass

Benjamin Lopez is modern-day Tom Sawyer! By day, he's a growth stage venture investor at Mercato, and by evening, an instructor for an MBA Finance Course at the University of Utah. Ben, reminiscent of Tom Sawyer getting neighborhood kids to pay to 'whitewash' a fence because it's fun, cleverly ropes others into teaching his lessons for him! While he may have been scraping the bottom of the barrel to invite me for last week's class…it turned out to be a blast! I wish my professors in college had brought in more real-world professionals. Hats off to Ben and his great class of MBAs asking great questions and making it a memorable evening. I think I can say we all enjoyed nerding out on all things SVB and Venture Debt! #Silicon Valley Bank #VentureDebt

This year, we our excited to be able to sponsor the Capital Summit at TechChicago Week 🌟 If you'll be in attendance, we look forward to seeing you at the opening dinner and poker night on Tuesday—come find us at the Mercato table and say 'hello'! Still haven't picked up your tickets yet? It's not too late ➡ https://lnkd.in/g-XzayQD #TechChicagoWeek2024

Mondays are for moving 🛩 This week we're off to Southern California to host a Funders and Founders dinner in Santa Monica in collaboration with Stifel Bank! You can also find us in both NYC and Chicago meeting with portfolio companies Paytient and Cylinder, respectively. In town? Reach out to connect 🤝

An important new study conducted by The Harris Poll uncovers the cost of ignoring employee GI distress, and highlights the impact that Cylinder, a Fund IV company, is making in patients' lives.

When considering the size of a design team you needed to support engineering and product teams, it’s important to understand how much design is already happening within your organization by non-designers. In an anonymized study by DesignMap, they found that in an organization that had a design team of 12, there was 28 FTEs worth of design happening in engineering and product. That equated to roughly $3MM a year being spend on non-UXers doing UX work, or roughly 59,000 hours. While it’s important to not silo design teams but rather build an inclusive design culture across an organization, understanding your spend on resources whose core competency is not design is essential to determining the right headcount for your design organization. On average, this ratio is around 1:8—meaning one designer per 8 engineers. #mercatocompass

Join us this October at the Main Street Summit! We're partnering up with Redbud VC to bring the first inaugural 'Venture & Startup' track to MSS, and are packing the roster with incredible founders, operators, and investors. Included with Classic, Flagship, and All-In passes, the VC/Startup Track includes exclusive programming, dinners, and much more! Questions? Drop them in the comments 👇

🛫 We are just under 12 weeks away from our 2024 Annual Meeting in Chicago, and are off to the windy city this week for site visits and event prep. While it's a quick in and out, we'd love to grab a ☕ between meetings!

Executives should expect designers to be capable of making specific, meaningful, and significant contributions to the company’s success. While designers face challenges in quantifying the ROI of their work, recent studies have helped to shine light on the business value of the function. ▶ According to a McKinsey study, companies with top-quartile McKinsey Design Index Scores outperformed industry-benchmark growth but as much as two to one [McKinsey, The Business Value of Design, 2018] ▶ In 2018, Forrester evaluated the economic impact of design investment at IBM to be 301% ROI over 3 years [Forrester, The Total Economics Impact of IBM’s Design Thinking Practice, 2018] ▶ Invision’s Design Frontier study determined that companies at the highest level of design maturity saw significant impact on revenue (92%), cost savings (85%), and valuation (52%) [Invision, The New Design Frontier, 2019] Across the board, design studies like these have enabled analysts to determine that design… makes employees more efficient and production, which puts products in the market quicker that are more innovative and drives higher customer lifetime value, improving the company’s market share and position and, ultimately, leading to growth. #mercatocompass