SZNS pioneered Albums — a new primitive for NFT collections that let artists and creators build curated, social gallery experiences. I led design and brand, and contributed to product strategy and go-to-market — my first time building a company from scratch.
OVERVIEW
SZNS was an NFT fractionalization platform focused on DAOs. We introduced Albums — curated collections that allowed multiple creators to collaborate and build social gallery experiences together. Think collaborative art shows, but onchain.
As Chief Design Officer and co-founder, I owned the entire design function: product design, brand identity, creative direction, and marketing strategy. I also led events and community building as we tried to establish SZNS in the rapidly evolving NFT space.
THE CHALLENGE
We faced two major headwinds: a rapidly shrinking TAM as the NFT market collapsed, and organizational challenges around DAO governance that no amount of good design could solve.
The fundamental insight: "No one wants responsibility, just ownership." People loved the idea of collective ownership but didn't want the actual work of governing and operating. This misalignment between expectation and reality made our DAO-focused approach untenable.
LESSONS LEARNED
SZNS was my first startup as a founder, and it taught me skills that were the opposite of everything I'd learned at Google: moving fast with incomplete information, wearing every hat, and making high-stakes decisions without consensus. Most importantly, I learned I could survive — and thrive — in the chaos of early-stage building. That confidence carried directly into Icebreaker.
KEY LEARNINGS
SZNS taught me about market timing, organizational design, and the limits of what product and design can solve. Some problems are structural, not executional.
The experience sharpened my ability to separate "design problems" from "business model problems" and deepened my understanding of Web3 primitives, community building, and early-stage go-to-market.
HOW I WORK
↳Trade-offs (what I cut + why)
- Pushed to simplify a complex auction and voting system that even I, as the designer, couldn't fully reason about. Lost that battle. We shipped bulky smart contract interactions that confused users
- The lesson: if the person designing the experience can't explain what's happening, the user definitely can't
↳Complexity → Clarity (making the tangled simple)
- Turned NFT fractionalization, a dense DeFi smart contract operation, into "Albums." Songs are like NFTs, and collections of songs are Albums. A familiar mental model for an entirely new financial concept
- The naming wasn't just branding. It was a linguistic bridge that let us skip 10 minutes of explaining what fractionalization means in every pitch and onboarding flow
↳Ambiguity (what I did when the brief was "figure it out")
- Had to uninstall my Google instincts fast. At Google, I shipped pixel-perfect designs through multi-week review cycles. At SZNS, the most important thing was getting something in front of a customer as soon as possible
- First startup from scratch. No design system, no brand, no process. Built all three while simultaneously learning what "startup speed" actually means
↳Systems thinking (upstream/downstream impacts)
- We entered NFTs because we were excited about them, not because we validated demand. Correctly identified fractionalization as an opportunity, but missed that "ownership without responsibility" was the core tension. People wanted to own pieces of things without governing them
- That insight reframed how I think about governance systems. Mostly, people want to enjoy the benefits without the work of responsibility
↳How I've changed
- Learned that the back-end engineer is the person I must be sitting with while designing. If they don't understand the UX intent during the build, I end up without the data I need to execute the right experience. Not obvious to me before SZNS
- Stopped treating design as a phase that happens before engineering. Started treating it as a continuous conversation with the people building the system
BACKED BY
MY ROLE
TIMELINE
DESIGN WORK
Albums platform homepage — enabling collaborative NFT collections with social gallery experiences
Logo variations and applications — flexible mark system for various contexts and backgrounds
Color palette and typography system — vibrant, Web3-native aesthetic balancing energy with clarity