Google's Design Boot Camp for Startups

“I think of it as our shared brain,” says Braden Kowitz, as he stands in a conference room where the walls are covered with Post-it notes. Kowitz, a design partner at Google Ventures, has spent the previous two days pushing six employees from lending startup OnDeck through a series of brainstorming exercises. It’s time to start building the user interface for a new kind of online loan. “Go for the risky stuff,” says Kowitz, as they huddle around a drawing of a football with the words “Hail Mary” written beside it in felt-tip marker. “It’s cheap to test it here.”

Kowitz wants to see what happens if the Manhattan-based OnDeck asks would-be borrowers for their bank account number at the start of the application process. With more data, the company can make more confident underwriting decisions. Yet it risks turning off potential customers by requesting sensitive personal details too soon. “There’s never been a good way to get more information from people,” says OnDeck Chief Operating Officer James Hobson.