J WEN DESIGN

Design for togetherness:
building bridges between design & strategy.

Jess Wen is a design strategy leader with 15 years of experience in the creative landscape. Over the past decade, she has focused on the venture and entrepreneurial ecosystem, helping hundreds of startups build beloved brands, outperform the market, and shape the future.

She’s on a mission to simplify, visualize, and prioritize complex ideas to build stronger businesses, better experiences, and more impactful brands.

Jess served as the Managing Director at West, a venture studio known for helping startups build beloved brands, outperform the market, and shape the future. During her tenure at West, Jess collaborated with hundreds of companies from seed to growth stage, leading them through strategic and creative transformations and reaching business objectives.

15 years of design experience, 10 dedicated in startups •

100+ startup clients •

$2.1B raised from featured clients •

15 years of design experience, 10 dedicated in startups • 100+ startup clients • $2.1B raised from featured clients •

→ CV

SUPERPOWERS

  • The world is complex, the market unpredictable, and stakeholders (always) have competing needs. Jess helps founders and investors bring clarity to every conversation by scoping, framing, and reframing opportunities.

  • With the uncommon path of a graphic designer turned strategist turned startup growth leader, Jess uses visuals to reset understanding and align executives, whether over Zoom or in the room.

  • Startups necessitate doing a lot with very little; every dollar and every minute counts. As the fifth hire at a startup that successfully exited, and with eight years of experience working with hundreds of founders and execs, Jess knows the value of dreaming big while staying disciplined, investor-minded, and ruthlessly practical.

  • Entrepreneurship is a wild ride (but you already know that).

    As a woman of color in this space, Jess has seen firsthand how real relationships and strong communities bring meaning and momentum to the journey.

    And hey, don’t just take her word for it. Reach out!

Featured Projects

Inception / Prelude Network

Healthcare • Venture/PE • Total Raised: $200M

In 2015, Prelude Network founder Martin Varsavsky reached out with an ambitious idea: to redefine the future of sex, fertility, and family-building. The strategy? Acquire the country’s top infertility clinics and transform them into a patient-first fertility network—one built not on fear and cold procedures, but on compassion, expert care, and a standardized, thoughtful experience.

From the new disruptor to the largest fertility network in North America, Prelude continued serving countless individuals and families with the highest quality of care while maintaining local and community relevancy.

SQUIRE

Operations • Series D • Valuation: $750M

Founded in 2015 by Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant, SQUIRE was built from lived experience. As Black entrepreneurs, they understood the barbershop’s role as a cultural and community cornerstone, and saw a clear opportunity to modernize the business behind the chair.

Today, SQUIRE processes over $1 billion in transaction volume and supports more than 35,000 barbers and businesses. Recognized as one of the next Black-owned unicorns, it continues to lead the category with best-in-class operational tools for the industry.

Trust & Will

Legal Services • Series B • Valuation: $200M

Trust & Will was founded in 2017 with a simple but powerful vision: estate planning should be accessible, affordable, and intuitive. For too long, leaving a legacy meant navigating an expensive, complex process that often ended in paperwork stored in a drawer. Trust & Will flipped that model—delivering modern estate planning tools with legal rigor, smart design, and human support.

With over 150,000 estate plans created in 2024 alone, and more than 1 million users since launch, Trust & Will is a category leader. The company has been recognized by CB Insights Fintech 100, CNBC Disruptor 50, and the Inc. 5000, all while maintaining 93% YoY growth in plans created.

SoLo Funds

Finance • Series B • Valuation: $150M

SoLo Funds was born from a belief: anyone can be financially responsible, but everyone needs help sometimes. In a country where nearly 80% of people live paycheck to paycheck, co-founders Travis Holoway and Rodney Williams saw a gap—and built a peer-to-peer lending platform rooted in empathy, transparency, and community.

Today, SoLo serves over 2 million users, with 1.6 million loans funded and a median funding time of just 20 minutes—averaging one loan per minute. 82% of its members come from underserved ZIP codes.

Outside of work-work

Jess organizes community gatherings—from large-scale events like TEDxSanFrancisco and Social Capital Market (SOCAP), to intimate, family-style dinners at home. As an introvert, she gains energy from deep one-on-one conversations (with a few goofy jokes in between), whether the room holds two people or a thousand.

Additionally, she teaches Creative Entrepreneurship at California College of the Arts (CCA), where she shares her belief that "designers have so much more to offer beyond the pixels." She also sits on the board of the Ratcliffe Center for Creative Entrepreneurship at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA RCCE).