Episode Details

How Clark Valberg and InVision are bringing founders’ creative ideas to life, and leading the way for remote workplaces.

Clark Valberg can tell you the exact date that his digital product design platform, InVision, launched. It was also his wedding day.

In hindsight, it’s telling that Valberg was able to successfully overlap these professional and personal milestones—InVision is known for its culture of work-life integration, with a 100% remote workforce nearing 900 employees. Eight years later, both InVision and Valberg’s marriage are still going strong.

When Valberg first launched the platform in 2011, it was meant to be a simple prototyping tool for his creative agency. Today, the company offers a full collaboration suite, InVision Cloud, that has redefined how companies design their products.

In addition to collecting over $350 million in funding and a being valued close to $2 billion—officially making it a unicorn—the startup now boasts over 5 million users and is the platform of choice for 97% of Fortune 100 companies, including major names like Amazon, Starbucks, and Uber.

Along the way, the company also redesigned the way its employees relate to the workplace, demonstrating early on just what’s possible in a remote company culture done right.

A Graceful Stumble

Before Valberg was known as the CEO of one of Silicon Valley’s most beloved tech companies, he ran a New York-based creative agency called Epicenter Consulting, from 2003 to 2011. It was a design and development shop that created websites for software companies. However, there was one issue their team consistently ran into when working with clients—incorporating feedback.

Valberg found it challenging to bring his clients along on the design journey, which meant that the first time they saw their website or app was after it had already been coded. That made the feedback process difficult and inefficient. This got him wondering: How could his team show designs to their clients earlier and more often?

That’s how the idea for InVision came to life. It was created to put all their designs into a platform where clients could see and comment on them — similar to how a Google Document allows multiple people to collaborate within the same project. This was a huge step forward compared to the standard method of sending out designs in PDFs or as screen shots.

Valberg had zero intention of turning this product into a standalone business. It wasn’t until someone inside his agency suggested sharing InVision with other companies that the thought even crossed his mind.

At first, Valberg resisted the idea. He figured people wouldn’t be open to drastically changing the way they worked with their clients. However, he was eventually swayed and put out feelers to see if people would bite.

As it turns out, people were interested. While Valberg was pleased with the response, it still hadn’t occurred to him to turn InVision into a full-time business. After all, his agency was doing extraordinarily well and bringing in $1 million in revenue each year. Again, fate stepped in and a designer Valberg worked with suggested raising venture money. And again, Valberg brushed off the idea.

However, the designer persisted and made an introduction to angel investor Daniel Wolfson.  Immediately, Wolfson saw the potential of InVision and connected Valberg to investors at FirstMark Capital. From there, a deal unfolded rapidly.

All of these events were, as Valberg puts it, a graceful stumble onto the path that he’s on today.

By the time Valberg secured his seed round of $1.1 million, users were signing up by the hundreds every day. This was when he realized that he needed to go all in on InVision. His wife took over his agency and successfully ran the business until 2018, while Valberg went through the next eight rounds of funding and elevated InVision to its esteemed status.

Ahead of the Curve

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