Airfoil

Mission & Key Concepts

Airfoil is a collective of designers, engineers, and artists helping cutting-edge products in crypto, the creator economy, and future of work take flight. Since our inception in 2019, we’ve worked with 80+ teams to bring their products to market, including Solana Labs, Drift Protocol, Layer3.xyz, Playhouse, Highbeam, and more.

We support founders from inception to hypergrowth, providing product design, branding, illustration, user testing, frontend/backend engineering, and go-to-market support to help projects get off the ground.

We also build and incubate new ventures at Airfoil, including Onramp, our DeFi product studio, Modu Fellowship, our fellowship for rising designers, and Mira, our newsletter reading and publishing platform. 

As we increase our involvement in the web3 space and prepare to launch our own product offerings, we’re rapidly growing our Toronto and Singapore-based (but remote friendly) design teams.  

Our team of 70+ creatives, across offices in San Francisco, Toronto, Singapore, Seoul, and remotely from 16+ countries around the world have tackled 90+ projects used by millions today across the cryptoeconomy - from wallets, to DEXs, to DAO tools and some of the first music and gaming NFT platforms.

As a fast-growing startup, working at Airfoil is both exciting and sometimes challenging.

Culture & Values

At Airfoil, we believe that your time with us should be helpful to us and to you, and we see your experience here as an opportunity to further your learning and growth as a designer. For these reasons, we will support you in several ways:

Thorough design critiques and support from our team.

Access to learning resources and projects. 

Cross-border experience and training from tech company founders. 

At Airfoil, we are committed to building a safe environment where you will be supported through your professional and personal growth. We are designers second and people first.

Our core beliefs:

• We believe web3 can do tremendous good - but it's up to us to ensure that happens.

‍Web3 can nudge companies to cooperate rather than compete, grant workers greater ownership, and help artists make a living. But it can also drive the over-financialization of everyday life. As participants in the beginning of a new industry, it's our responsibility to set it in a positive direction.

• We believe companies are communities, and should care about their people.

We see empathy as a superpower, and work hard to cultivate a company culture of collaboration > competition. We have a flatter hierarchy than most companies of our kind, where everyone knows one another on a first name basis and where critical feedback of leadership is allowed and encouraged.

• We believe in assessing your skills, not your brand name.

‍Phil previously founded a company devoted to giving underrepresented talent a chance, so we took that to heart from day 1: hiring designers and engineers globally using paid take-home assessments rather than resumés.

• We're remote friendly - because it's the fairest way to build the best team possible.

Though we'd love to welcome you to one of our hubs in Canada, Singapore, or Korea, as talent is globally distributed, we should be too.

History & Achievements

• Founded: 2019
• Industry: Studio
• HQ: San Francisco, US

We didn't start out as the largest design team in crypto, but as a small agency with a goal: to prove it's possible to build great products while treating our people with genuine care and respect.

Founded in 2019 by Phil Hedayatnia and Min Kim, Airfoil began as a small fintech-focused design agency in San Francisco. Frustrated by experiences at startups that put productivity over people, Phil and Min wanted to do something different: help startups succeed while ensuring the creatives behind each product launch do too.

Phil gradually expanded the team to tackle more contract work for his peers at SPC, and later spun off Airfoil as a standalone creative design and growth agency focused on helping early stage technology companies "take flight" with the assistance of Airfoil's design team. By the end of 2020, Airfoil's client base exceeded 20 companies.

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, we refocused Airfoil as a pure "design company" across two areas: Airfoil Studio, our design agency focused on early-stage ventures, and Airfoil Ventures, our internal product incubator working on new ideas in the future of work, future of media, and creator economy. Across both, we're now a team of 40+ creative designers, engineers, and product managers working together on projects that challenge us creatively.

Core Team

• Phil Hedayatnia - Co-Founder & CEO
• Min Kim - Co-Founder & COO
• Mehedi Hasan - Product Designer 
• Ian Choe - Head of Business Development
• Nate Elliott - Chief of Staff