Felix Haas is a German designer.

He was one of the first designers at Lovable, one of the fastest-growing software companies in history, and today he helps lead its design team. Alongside Lovable, he works with founders and companies he believes in.

Before that, he was the first designer at Mapify and at Gorillas, and co-founded the design studio Blossom Design, which Sonic acquired in 2024. As an investor, he has backed more than 30 start-ups and is a Scout for Sequoia Capital.

He believes the best products are kind: they know the difference between being useful and being needed, and then they get out of the way.

This is his story so far, and the story of the people who shaped it.

Early life and education

Felix was born in 1998 in Düsseldorf, Germany. His parents ran a fashion business, so he grew up around collections, galleries and art fairs, where he first learned to look closely at form and detail.

He fell in love with building things while still at school and taught himself to design and develop his own consumer apps. After studying business and management at the Technical University of Munich, he went to Harvard University to study business and design. A year later he left: he couldn’t wait any longer to build products of his own.

Career

Skip App

At eighteen, Felix founded his first company, Skip App, an instant photo-sharing app that let people send pictures to those around them in the moment. He designed and built it himself, raised a pre-seed round from angel investors in Munich and Los Angeles, and moved to Palo Alto in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The app launched on the App Store in early 2018, and the company closed later that year. It didn’t become what he had hoped, but looking back, it’s the reason he became a designer.

Mapify

In the Bay Area, Felix met Patrick Haede, co-founder of the travel platform Mapify, who became one of his closest collaborators and still is. He joined Mapify as its founding designer, later became head of design, and shaped the product end to end.

Apple featured the app on the App Store several times, and from 2019 it came preinstalled on devices in Apple Stores. Mapify raised more than $3 million in venture capital and was acquired by HomeToGo in 2021.

Gorillas and independent practice

His work at Mapify opened the door to a series of early-stage companies. In October 2020, at twenty-two, Felix became the first designer at Gorillas, the Berlin grocery-delivery start-up that grew into one of the fastest-growing companies in European history. Working side by side with the founders, he designed its first app and laid the foundations of its brand.

He was also the first designer at Arive, and over time he became a design partner to early-stage and hyper-growth companies.

Business Insider has called him one of the most sought-after designers in the European start-up scene.

Creandum and Blossom Design

In January 2022, the venture capital firm Creandum invited Felix to become one of its first Designers in Residence. He worked alongside the investment team and helped portfolio companies with product design and design hiring.

Later that year, he and Johanna Weber founded Blossom Design, a product and brand studio, so they could partner with more companies at once. Sonic acquired the studio in September 2024.

Lovable

After a period in Paris, where he advised and invested in start-ups, Felix met the founders of Lovable at an event in London. He believed in what they were building and invested in the company.

In March 2025, he joined Lovable as one of its first designers. Today he helps lead the design team at a company growing at a pace few in the history of software have matched.

Investing

Alongside his design work, Felix has backed more than 30 start-ups as an angel investor, and since 2025 he has been a Scout for Sequoia Capital. With Patrick Haede, he hosts Quick Coffee, a podcast and investment vehicle. Being there for founders early is one of his favourite parts of the work.

Writing and speaking

In his newsletter, Felix writes about interface design, artificial intelligence and start-ups; writing is how he makes sense of what he sees. His essays include “Kind Products Win” (2025) and “Invisible Interfaces” (2026).

He speaks regularly at conferences and gives guest lectures around the world, including at Slush, TechCrunch and Founders Forum.

Personal projects

Alongside his work, Felix pursues personal projects. The first is Letters from Felix: letters to people who have inspired him, because he believes we don’t tell people often enough what they’ve meant to us.

Haas Foundation

Together with his sister, Hanna Haas, Felix is one of the managing directors of the Haas Foundation, the family’s foundation. Its first projects will be shared soon.

Design philosophy and influences

Felix’s work is guided by reduction: he believes a design is complete when there’s nothing left to take away. As AI makes software ever easier to produce, he argues, the value of design lies less in execution than in intention, in deciding what deserves to be built and building it with care. To him, the job of designers is to make AI usable, trustworthy and human.

Kindness is a theme he keeps coming back to. After a decade in which design was devoted to efficiency, he wants technology that is not only powerful but kind. He also writes about interfaces that recede, and about a future in which people talk to AI agents and design moves to the moments of trust and approval.

Few people shaped Felix as much as his grandmother, Ilse Haas. They were very close. She was an icon of fashion and design, and she began collecting art early in life.

As a child, he went with her to openings. She would tell him what she liked and show him what to pay attention to, and somewhere along the way he found his own taste. He still sees her in his work today. She is a great inspiration to him, and he is deeply grateful to her.

Thank you

A big thank you to everyone who believed in me, inspired me and helped me figure things out. I’m truly grateful. Here are just a few of you, in no particular order.

Bernd GandrasLeni ZimmermannMona SalemChris HeyerSidney FrancoisStefan KastenmüllerAdrian KiehnVincent BodoPatrick HaedeJames BakerPuneet SharmaJohanna WeberLukas HaasKeno PeerHendrik HölzerLudwig BuhrEduard WieandtDennis MüllerClara HoffmannLeonard SaitzLeon DrieseAnton Osika

& my family and friends