‘Your best mind energy is right in the morning and right after lunch’: Ben Blumenrose on how to bring creativity into venture capitol

The cofounder and managing partner at Designer Fund says the path to innovation starts with tinkering. It would be very easy for Ben Blumenrose to buy his nearly 7-year-old daughter a kit to build a Rube Goldberg machine. Instead, he gave her some spent toilet paper rolls, pieces of cardboard, and bits and bobs found around their house. That’s because she’ll need to play, imagine, and pivot with these objects. It’s his way of helping her discover the value of tinkering, an activity that shaped his way of thinking. As a child, he hacked the first video games he bought and figured out how to use his computer to make art. “It was this intersection of design, creativity, technology, and just tinkering,” he says. “That is where I came from.”