Four Years at Opto: A Once-in-a-Lifetime 0-to-1 Journey

In mid-2022, I walked into a small office in New York to join a company called Opto Investments. There was no design team. There was no design system. The platform had articles about private markets, some impressive technology under the hood, and a digital subscription document flow that was genuinely ahead of its time. A handful of warehouse funds sat on a listing page. Three preset model portfolios. Zero paying clients.

Almost four years later, when I left, that single page of articles had evolved into a multi-platform enterprise system: an Advisor app with Custom Funds, automated Proposals, and a Planner tool; an Investor Portal; a CIO platform; a mobile app; and a brand-new product called Radar. I designed most of it. Two other designers joined later and took on the CIO platform. This is the story of how one product became many, told through every feature we shipped along the way.

This isn't a case study. I already wrote that. This is the personal story of what it felt like to be a founding designer at a startup trying to reinvent how wealthy people invest in private markets.

Day One: Articles, Technology, No Customers

Opto's original pitch was elegant. The company had invested $100M in institutional-grade private market funds and built a platform to sell smaller allocations to wealth management firms. While the rest of the industry was processing subscription documents on paper and fax, Opto had built a TurboTax-style digital questionnaire that walked advisors through the most tedious paperwork in private investing: subdocs, the regulatory and compliance documentation required to commit capital to a private fund.

But the product itself was sparse. A warehouse funds list with a handful of pre-selected funds. Three model portfolios. And a lot of articles about private markets. The technology was sophisticated. The product-market fit was not. The sales team was working the phones. Marketing was producing content. And I was designing screens for a product that nobody was using.

The First Features: Add to Cart and Indicate Interest

My first projects gave advisors something the existing model didn't: agency. The recommendation engine forced advisors into preset portfolios with no flexibility. I designed Add to Cart and Indicate Interest flows that let advisors browse the warehouse funds list, pick the ones they wanted, and signal intent without being pushed through an algorithm. Simple interactions, but they represented a fundamental shift: trusting the advisor to make their own decisions instead of prescribing a portfolio for them.

Even with easier access to individual funds, conversions barely moved. But the data told us something: advisors were browsing. They were interested. The barrier was somewhere deeper in how we were asking people to invest.

Building the Investor Experience

Next came the Investor Profile, a complete view of an investor's holdings, proposals, and account activity. For the first time, advisors could see their client's full picture in one place. I also built the Investor Portal from scratch, a separate platform where end clients could log in and see their own holdings, tax documents, and fund updates. Three distinct user types, each needing their own experience, designed by one person.

With the investor side taking shape, I turned to the advisor's biggest pain point: making the case to clients. I designed Proposal auto-generation, polished shareable PDFs that advisors could hand to clients to make the argument for private market allocation. No more manually assembling pitch decks. The platform generated them from the advisor's selections, branded and ready to present.

The Planner: Turning Uncertainty into Confidence

Even with better tools, advisors new to private markets hesitated. They understood the diversification benefit but couldn't articulate to clients how these funds would perform over time. Working with engineers, analysts, and the data team, I designed the Planner, a tool that modeled how private market investments would perform alongside a client's existing portfolio. It could forecast fund performance over 5, 10, 15 year horizons.

The Planner got a lot of client attention. For the first time, advisors could show concrete projections instead of abstract pitch decks. It became one of the features that moved firms from "interested" to "signed." And it fed directly back into the Proposals: the forecasting data from the Planner flowed into auto-generated Proposal PDFs, giving advisors a professional, data-backed way to make the case for allocation.

The Insight: From Warehouse to Custom

I stopped accepting the existing narrative and went back to first principles, running research and direct interviews with advisors and their clients, sitting in on sales calls, digging into every piece of qualitative data I could find.

The finding was simple and devastating: investors weren't afraid of private markets. They were afraid of putting $100,000 into a single fund. The fear was concentration risk, not the asset class itself. They wanted $100K spread across Private Equity and Venture Capital, not $100K locked into a single fund for six to ten years.

That distinction redirected the entire company. We had started with a handful of warehouse funds, pre-selected funds Opto had already committed capital to. But what if instead of selling individual warehouse funds, we offered a cocktail? A custom vehicle made of multiple slices across asset classes, tailored to the investor's preferences? We called them Custom Funds. I designed the entire Custom Funds flow from scratch, then the Custom Fund Details page where advisors could see the composition, performance projections, and underlying fund allocations of each custom vehicle.

Design System 2.0 and the App Revamp

By this point, the product had grown organically across dozens of features. The original UI was showing its seams. I led Design System 2.0, a complete visual and component overhaul that unified the entire Advisor experience. This wasn't a polish pass. It was a structural redesign that touched every surface of the app, establishing patterns that would scale as the platform kept growing.

Alongside this, I redesigned Subdocs 2.0, a ground-up rebuild of the subscription document flow. Subdocs are the most tedious paperwork in private investing: pages of legal, compliance, and regulatory documentation required to commit capital to a fund. The 2.0 version made the process significantly faster and more reliable. The revamped app, combined with the new design system, was a different product from what I had walked into.

Beyond Our Own Funds

The platform's fund universe kept expanding. First warehouse funds, then Custom Funds, and then we started bringing in funds from outside our platform entirely: Tender Offer Funds. These were a completely different fund type with their own mechanics, and they required dedicated detail pages and a distinct workflow. I designed the Tender Offer Funds experience, the details pages, and the integration into the existing advisor flow.

Then came the US Bank deal, our biggest enterprise client. This pushed the product into true enterprise territory. The subdoc flow needed a live feedback loop between Admin and Analyst approval workflows, so I designed a real-time review and approval system where analysts could flag issues and admins could resolve them without the back-and-forth of email. The platform had gone from a handful of warehouse funds on a listing page to managing institutional-scale transactions for one of the largest banks in the country.

The Problem Nobody Was Solving

Somewhere in the middle of all this shipping, something kept nagging me. I was talking to every sales rep individually, and each one had a completely different take on where the product was falling short. Priorities were scattered. Perspectives conflicted. Nobody had the full picture.

I dug deeper. I ran structured interviews across the entire sales team, not to validate a design, but to understand where the organizational seams were tearing. What I found was systemic: Sales and Product had no regular syncs. Tickets landed in a backlog with no shared framework for prioritization. Every sprint was a negotiation between competing roadmap priorities.

I researched how companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Spotify, and Linear managed the transition from scrappy startup to structured product org. The research led me to a term that crystallized everything: feature factory. We were shipping features in response to individual requests but never stepping back to ask system-level questions.

I introduced a framework that categorized work into four buckets: Quick Fixes, Product Improvements, Product Capabilities, and Innovation. It wasn't a design deliverable. It was a structural intervention that changed how four PMs prioritized work, how engineering allocated capacity, and how the company thought about what to build next.

Three Designers, New Platforms

The hiring work eventually paid off. We grew into a three-person design team. The other two designers took on the CIO Platform, a separate product where Chief Investment Officers could handle fund creation, use the Allocation Builder tool to construct fund vehicles, monitor fund performance, and conduct fund analysis through what we called Investopedia, a research and due diligence hub. That platform eventually became Opto's second revenue stream as a standalone SaaS tool.

I continued leading the Advisor app end-to-end and took on two new platforms: the Mobile version of Opto and Radar, a brand-new 0-to-1 product. Radar was a public and private market rebalancing tool for endowments, something that didn't exist anywhere in the market. I spent a week embedded at Fi3 Financial in Indianapolis, a firm managing nearly $1B in assets. Watching advisors rebalance portfolios with spreadsheets, gut feel, and manual calculations gave us the signal we needed to validate the hypothesis.

What It Actually Felt Like

People ask what it's like to be a founding designer at a startup. The honest answer is: it's simultaneously the most exciting and most exhausting thing you can do in this profession.

There are days when you're whiteboarding a concept at 9am that's in production by the end of the month. Days when a single research finding rewrites the company's strategy. Days when you design a Tender Offer flow in a week because a client needs it and there's nobody else to do it.

And then there are the other days. The ones where you're the only designer for a year and every surface of the product needs attention simultaneously. Where you're trying to hire your own team while also shipping the work that team would be doing. Where you're in a sprint planning meeting wondering why nobody can agree on priorities, and you realize the problem isn't the people, it's the system.

The thing that kept me going was trust. Trust in the product team, trust in the process, trust that the slow and unglamorous work of finding product-market fit would eventually click. Through failed experiments, late pivots, and the long stretches where metrics barely moved, trust is what kept us shipping.

The Numbers

When I left Opto in early 2026, the platform had grown from zero to 15+ enterprise RIA firms. Committed capital had crossed $600M. Twenty-nine Custom Funds had been deployed. The transaction count went from 533 to 1,363. Over 4,800 funds had been researched on the platform. The company had evolved from a single page of articles into a multi-platform enterprise system with two distinct SaaS revenue streams.

I'm proud of those numbers. But I'm prouder of the design decisions that made them possible. Giving advisors agency with Add to Cart and Indicate Interest. Discovering concentration risk and designing Custom Funds. Building the Planner that turned hesitant advisors into confident ones. Redesigning subdocs from scratch. Shipping Tender Offer Funds in a week. Fixing a broken prioritization process that wasn't my job to fix. And building Radar, a product that didn't exist anywhere in the market.

What I Took Away

The real problem always hides behind the obvious one. Investors didn't reject private markets; they rejected concentration risk. That distinction, which only emerged through deep qualitative research, redirected the entire company from warehouse funds to Custom Funds.

Design the system, not the screen. With multiple user roles, an expanding fund universe, and a regulatory-heavy domain, the value wasn't in individual interfaces. It was in ensuring every touchpoint, from Add to Cart through subdocs through the Investor Portal, connected into a coherent lifecycle.

Founding-stage design means wearing every hat. Running research, shipping product, delegating marketing design, hiring your own team, all at once. Embracing that breadth instead of waiting for support was how I created the most impact.

And sitting with users changes everything. Always has. Always will.