Adit
Gupta
Founder, BookStates
Ted-like
Designpreneurship
Mid-level Designers
About The Speaker
Adit Gupta is a design-led founder and product thinker with over 15 years of experience crafting digital products at the intersection of usability, systems thinking, and human insight. He is currently the founder of BookStates, a personal reading companion that helps users track, reflect, and deepen their engagement with books.
Previously, Adit served as Director of Product Design at ServiceNow, leading cross-functional design teams across products and geographies. He has also worked at PayPal, where he shaped foundational experiences in global payments.
Adit’s entrepreneurial journey began with Function Space, a social learning network for math and science where he reimagined interaction design for deep learning. He later built UX Assist, a workflow planning app for designers that has helped thousands bring clarity to their UX processes.
Across roles and ventures, Adit combines craft with strategic clarity — always aiming to create experiences that are not just functional, but inevitable. He believes designers are uniquely positioned to lead meaningful ventures by translating vision into systems with empathy, precision, and conviction.
About The Talk/Workshop
From Spark to System: My Journey as a Design-Led Founder
In this talk, Adit Gupta shares lessons from his entrepreneurial journey—the sparks that inspired new ventures, the systems he had to build from scratch, the pivots, the failures, and the quiet victories along the way. The session explores what it means to lead with design, when to trust intuition over market signals, and how to stay grounded while building something that doesn’t yet exist.
This talk is especially relevant for designers who are considering starting up or are already navigating the challenges of building something of their own.
Key Takeaways
Design is more than form — it’s the foundation.
Great design doesn’t end at the interface. It shapes how systems behave, how teams align, and how products evolve. As a founder, your design lens becomes a strategic asset — guiding not just what you build, but how you build it.
Building a design-led business takes more than craft.
Taste gives you direction, but resilience keeps you going. To turn a design instinct into a sustainable venture, you need the ability to scale your intuition — into hiring, roadmaps, messaging, and more. It’s a constant dance between the aesthetic and the operational.
A design founder walks the edge between clarity and chaos.
You’re the one holding the vision while wrestling the ambiguity of execution. In that tension, clarity becomes your compass. The ability to distill complexity, communicate purpose, and make confident decisions is what carries the product — and the team — forward.