Editor’s note: ExitEvent and WRALTechWire will be cooperating in presenting news about the region’s entrepreneurial sector. Today, Laura Baverman, editor of the ExitEvent blog, offers an exclusive story: “Meet the Man Bringing Valley-like Design Thinking to Triangle Startups.” The interview tells “he back story behind DXLab Design’s new partnership with HQ Raleigh.”
RALEIGH, N.C. – Lance Cassidy was doing cutting-edge aerospace engineering work at the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia when he saw a glaring gap between engineering and design.
Engineers could solve the most complex problems, but designers helped them find the right problems to solve. And he wanted to know more about that.
So the N.C. State engineering graduate went back to his alma mater to become an industrial designer, and has set off on a design career that’s led to consulting work at a high profile San Francisco hardware incubator, an MIT Design Lab startup and an Andreessen Horowitz-funded Silicon Valley app. He’s also helped turn around his family’s ecommerce company in Cary and started three of his own businesses.
One of those, DXLab Design, will open an incubator at the new downtown HQ Raleigh next month with at least seven designers providing insight and design to any of the co-working space’s startup members while each working on their own startups and projects.
“I really like supporting the movement of getting design entrepreneurs the resources and opportunities to take their initiative forward,” Cassidy says. “I think a lot of them are really timid about entrepreneurship. They think, ‘I’m not a developer,’ but that’s a strength.”
The full story can be read online at ExitEvent.
Note: ExitEvent and WRALTechWire are both part of the Capitol Broadcasting family. ExitEvent is operated by The American Underground in Durham. WRALTechWire is part of Capitol’s New Media Group. The American Underground announced its acquisition of ExitEvent last week.
