The Promise of AI (Part II) - Unlocking more design visionaries

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident"

— Exchange between Inspector Gregory and Sherlock Holmes

Humans are not amazing at seeing what didn't happen, i.e., the dog that didn't bark. When people see something that works, it's natural to decide there's a pattern and run with that. Less time is spent thinking about the dog that didn't bark; in this case the brilliant non-technical founders that didn't create amazing companies.

Technical founders are a formula that works for technology companies. The Social Network cemented the image of what a brilliant founder looks like - a technical genius, perhaps with a hoodie and a dorm room. This desire for technical founders exists for a good reason because it's been almost impossible to build a company delivering technological breakthroughs without technical brilliance. The need for technical brilliance, however, means that non-technical founders can get stuck when working on a simultaneous equation: it's hard to get a technical co-founder without capital and it's hard to get capital without a technical co-founder.

In The Promise of AI (Part I), I wrote about AI giving more leverage to brilliant founders, engineers and designers. The designer reference was a deliberate choice with a specific example in mind; someone who was not technical and yet built an extraordinary company with the help of an exceptional technical co-founder. That person is Melanie Perkins of Canva (and I'm not writing about her because we are both from Perth).

Canva has empowered everyone to design and ultimately has made Perkins and her co-founders among the richest people in Australia. Melanie Perkins' 2018 post about the early days of Canva here is a must-read for anyone doing hard things. There's a level of candor and honesty in it that you rarely see from successful people (and Perkins and Canva were already successful by 2018).

In that post, the simultaneous equation issue is apparent in the early Canva story. Perkins and her co-founder Cliff Obrecht, started with a business to design and publish school yearbooks, which had a ceiling. For Canva, it took over a year to find the technical talent. All the while Bill Tai, eventually a seed funder, would only provide funding if they could build the right technical team. Perkins noted that investors generally said that without a technical team / CTO, they couldn't fund the company. The question she had was how could they get the company rolling?

While Perkins was resilient, determined and a just-in-time learner, Canva was still rejected by 100+ investors (despite her even learning kitesurfing to attend a conference with investors). It seems likely that many other talented designer founders would have given up. The designer founders who never created great companies, who couldn't overcome the friction of the simultaneous equation - these missing founders are the "dog that didn't bark" from Sherlock Holmes.

By enabling almost anyone to build MVPs with code, AI can help solve this simultaneous equation and unlock a new wave of "design visionaries," who don't fit the mould of most founders who have come before them.

Instead of wireframes and at least 44 iterations on pitch decks, the 2026 version of Melanie Perkins could have used Claude Code to design a Canva MVP and taken that to potential investors. In fact, the limitations of wireframes and pitch decks can be seen in that same blog post from Perkins, which had a screenshot of one of Canva's earliest investors tweeting that he finally understood what they'd been talking about once Canva launched.

Scaling brilliant tech companies will surely continue to require extraordinary technical talents and the kind of guidance Lars Rasmussen (the Google Maps co-founder who became an early Canva advisor) gave to Perkins. Even with the team in place, it still took a year from landing their initial investment to launching the product.

What ultimately matters is getting started and to get started, design visionaries can use AI to build an MVP, then take something from "chaos to clarity" (like Perkins says) and build the next great designer-led company, like Canva or Airbnb.

"[C]omputers are complements for humans, not substitutes. The most valuable businesses of the coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete." — Peter Thiel, Zero to One