Why I Invested in Falcon
When my fellow Next Wave NYC Investment Partner, Hassan Bhatti, shared a company that sought to be the Figma for the AI era, I was super intrigued. I started my own company with rudimentary Photoshop skills gained from one High School design class and years making side money designing flyers for an Atlanta chain known for their bomb lemon pepper wings. Tastemakers needed to look official and, quite frankly, the brand needed to POP. When I first started the company, I designed the app in Photoshop (even then, a very outdated approach, lol), and sent it to a guy in Texas who then lightly programmed it into a prototype app, complete with an icon on my iPhone, and all the features I could use to demo to investors. Fast forward a few months to Congressional Black Caucus weekend, and I showed this demo to Jon Gosier, who became one of my first angel investors and gave me the juice to realize I was building a "tech startup," something that hadn't quite occurred to me yet.
It took nearly four years of winning startup competitions and finding angel investors along the way before we had enough cash to hire our first contract UX person (shout out to Thu Do) and a bit longer before we raised venture capital and could hire a full-time product designer (the super talented Muwosi Mukochi) who could help us pivot our product into an experiences marketplace where you could book tours with local artists, chefs, textile makers, DJs, you name it (think AirBnB experiences new current cool form). That pivot got us to $1M+ ARR within six months after chugging along at a much slower revenue pace for years.
All that to say, I know the pain of design in a business, the opportunity of quality design, and how for non-technical or first-time founders, this can make or break your business. I was fortunate to have my Photoshop 101 class, a natural eye for design, and a determination to learn what I don't know and stay up all night doing it. However, many people, including those with billion-dollar ideas in their minds, get stuck at the start because the barriers to design tools, engineering, and a designer's mindset are too high.
From Kid Pix to $90M Exit: A Designer's 17-Year Journey
Enter Ahmed Saleh, the founder of Falcon. Ahmed's story resonated deeply with me because it mirrors that creative hunger I felt when I first discovered I could bring ideas to life through design. At 13, Ahmed had a transformative moment in a computer lab, discovering Kid Pix and experiencing what he calls "the euphoria of creation." That moment sparked a 17-year journey through the evolution of design tools - from Photoshop's revolutionary layers to Sketch's focused elegance, and eventually to Figma's multiplayer breakthrough.
But what sets Ahmed apart isn't just his deep design background - it's his unique vantage point as someone who's lived both sides of the design equation. After leading design at Gilded (acquired by Roblox for $90M), he found himself in an unusual position at Roblox, overseeing not just one product but three: Gilded, Communities, and Bloxlink. While most designers at big companies focus on "a page or a button," Ahmed was managing entire product ecosystems and seeing firsthand how design bottlenecks scaled companies.
At Gilded, they shipped weekly - design, code, marketing videos, the works. At Roblox, even small features took months or years. The bureaucracy was part of it, but Ahmed identified something deeper: "Design just took a long time to design things, to be frank." This wasn't just a process problem - it was an architectural one.
The $32B Problem Hiding Behind Every "Quick Mockup"
Ahmed's insight led him to a counterintuitive market realization. When he first built Falcon for designers, getting feedback from top talent at GitHub, Notion, and Spotify, they told him something unexpected: "This tool would be better for non-designers."
This feedback unlocked a massive but underserved market. In engineering-driven companies - think Roblox, Grafana, SourceGraph - there's an aspiration to create good design but not the DNA to support it. Product managers and engineers are constantly blocked by design capacity. One designer can only work one project at a time, taking months, while the C-suite pulls them in multiple directions. Most mockups never make it to production - Ahmed estimates only 10% of his hundreds of designs at Roblox actually shipped.
The result? PMs need mockups just to show the C-suite, generate buy-in, and get alignment before they can even engage design resources. Engineers need to prototype ideas quickly. Non-technical founders with billion-dollar ideas get stuck because the barrier to entry is too high.
The market opportunity is enormous and growing:
Full-scale design platforms: expected to hit $18.95B by 2030
AI-powered design tools: projected even higher
Design services (prototyping, validation): $32.3B by 2030
But I believe these numbers are conservative. As AI capabilities deepen and integrate into enterprise and individual workflows, we'll see entirely new product possibilities that create even greater demand for accessible design tools.
The Falcon Difference: Building the Dataset While Others Build Demos
Falcon isn't trying to replace Figma or compete with V0 and Bolt. It's positioned at a different stage of the design process - the early exploration phase where speed and iteration matter most. Instead of one-shotting design and going straight to production, Falcon lets you rapidly explore different concepts through text prompts: "Insert this login flow, make it look like Nike, round all the corners." What might take hours, days, or weeks can happen in seconds.
The technical architecture behind this is what excites me most. While others in the space are focused on the interface, Ahmed is building the foundation that will make AI design actually work. The key insight: design AI fails because it lacks consensus in training data. When you Google "login form," you get thousands of variations - the AI can't find signal in the noise.
Falcon is taking a contrarian approach by starting with the dataset. They're cataloging every UI element in every state (buttons, carousels, sliders) across platforms, then building what Ahmed calls a "design graph" that maps relationships between elements. A login form contains email field + password field + button with 0.8 confidence. This foundational infrastructure will enable the AI layer to make intelligent suggestions based on context and established patterns.
Roblox > Stanford MBAs: The Contrarian GTM Play
Ahmed's go-to-market strategy is refreshingly pragmatic. Rather than chasing the flashy founder market, he's focused on IC product managers at growing engineering-driven technology companies - the buyers who represent repeatable revenue rather than boom-and-bust cycles.
This isn't just smart positioning; it's based on hard-earned wisdom from his Roblox experience. He saw firsthand how enterprise contracts work, how customers churn, and what it takes to build sustainable business health.
The Multi-Agent Future of Product Building
What really sold me is Ahmed's long-term vision for Falcon as part of a broader "design compute" ecosystem. He envisions a world where PRDs, prototypes, and handoff documents are all different views of the same underlying data structure. You could start from any point - the doc, the prototype, the PRD - and everything stays in sync.
Think of it as a neo-Adobe for product development: custom-built tools for PMs (North Star), engineers (Handoff), QA teams, and designers, all connected by a single source of truth. Imagine agentic tools that test designs overnight across every device, platform, and language, making fixes by morning. This isn't just about democratizing design - it's about reimagining how we build products entirely.
Why I Invested
Falcon represents the intersection of several trends I'm betting on: AI-native tooling, the democratization of creative capabilities, and the evolution of product development workflows. But beyond the market opportunity, I'm investing in Ahmed - a founder who combines deep domain expertise with the humility to pivot based on customer feedback and the technical vision to build foundational infrastructure while others focus on surface-level features.
I wish I had Falcon when I started Tastemakers. It could have collapsed the time it took to get to our scalable version, letting me focus on what mattered most: building relationships with creators and understanding our market. That's the promise of design compute - giving everyone the superpower to bring ideas to life at the speed of thought.
The future of design tools will go from pixels to code, from multiplayer to multiagent, and from direct manipulation to multimodal prompts. Ahmed and the Falcon team are building that future, and I'm excited to be along for the ride.
