Irene Au

Irene Au is a design executive turned venture-capital operating partner, widely regarded as one of the people who professionalized human-centered design inside the consumer internet's defining companies. She began her career as an interaction designer at Netscape Communications (1996–1998), working on the era's leading commercial web browser. In 1998 she joined Yahoo!, where she founded and built the company's user-experience design practice, eventually becoming VP of User Experience and leading a team of roughly 150 people by the time she left in 2006.

She then spent six years at Google (2006–2012) as its top design leader, responsible for design and user research across all Google-branded products worldwide during a formative period for the company. In 2012 she moved to Udacity as employee #20, serving as VP of Product and Design and helping the online-education startup find product-market fit around project-based technical learning. In April 2014 she joined Khosla Ventures as the firm's first design operating partner — a then-novel role embedding senior design leadership inside a VC firm.

In her partner role she coaches and advises founders, CEOs, and design and product leaders across Khosla's portfolio — from seed-stage startups through companies that have exited. Her focus is helping portfolio companies build design-centric organizations, recruit top design and research talent, and mature their design processes and leadership. She frames design not as decoration but as strategy: "design is a manifestation of the company's vision, values, strategy, scope, and ability to execute."

Au holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering (summa cum laude, Honors College) from the University of South Carolina and an M.S. in industrial engineering / human-computer interaction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of the O'Reilly book *Design in Venture Capital*, has taught product design as an adjunct lecturer at Stanford, serves (or has served) as a trustee of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and as a juror for the Red Dot Design Awards, and is a longtime yoga teacher and frequent speaker on design, creativity, and mindfulness.

• Backs early-stage (seed-leaning, with some pre-seed and Series A) companies where design and user experience are central to the product and to building a durable advantage.
• Believes "design needs an advocate and advisor at the highest levels of the company for it to be successful" — she looks for founders who treat design as a strategic, executive-level concern rather than a downstream function.
• Joined Khosla Ventures specifically because the team has deep operating experience, invests in "meaningful problems," and "care[s] deeply about design."
• Personal angel checks are small (roughly $5K–$50K, sweet spot ~$25K); the heavier capital and follow-on come through Khosla Ventures itself.
• Aggregator data tags her with health-IT/digital-health and enterprise-software interest, but her disclosed personal deals skew toward design-forward consumer and developer/design tooling.