Stavan Patel

Stavan Patel is the Creative Director and Partner at Founders, Inc., the San Francisco venture firm operating from the Fort Mason campus ¹⁰. Before f.inc, he was Head of Design and part of the founding team at buildspace, where he shaped the visual identity of the Nights & Weekends program across five seasons ²¹⁷. Patel grew up in India, moved to Chicago at age 14, and studied computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ¹.

Early life and education

Patel was born and raised in India and moved to Chicago at the age of 14 ¹. He enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2010 and graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering ². The following year he completed HBX CORe — a 120- to 150-hour credential program covering business analytics, economics, and financial accounting — through Harvard Business School Online ².

Microsoft and Skills4Afrika (2014–2017)

Patel's first job out of college was as an Azure consultant at Microsoft, where he worked from July 2014 to July 2017 ²³. During that period, in May–June 2016, he traveled to Lusaka, Zambia, as a startup mentor and web development coach with Skills4Afrika, a volunteer program teaching small and medium businesses how to build websites using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap, develop social media strategies, and conduct business online ².

Quze (2017–2022)

In August 2017 Patel left Microsoft to found Quze, an online course discovery platform ²³. The company was incorporated in November 2018 as Quze Education Private Limited in Vadodara, Gujarat, India, with Patel and Jaya Lalwani as directors ⁹. Tracxn classified Quze's status as "deadpooled" by the time Patel moved on in March 2022, though the Indian legal entity remained active ⁹. He ran Quze for nearly five years before joining buildspace ⁸.

buildspace (2022–2024)

Patel joined buildspace in March 2022 as Head of Design, part of the founding team working alongside Farza Majeed ²⁸¹⁷. At buildspace he designed the visual identity and branded artwork for seasons 3, 4, and 5 of Nights & Weekends — the free six-week cohort program that scaled from roughly 7,500 participants in Season 3 to over 120,000 in Season 5 ¹¹². He also designed the buildspace.so website, the buildspaceOS platform, and the campus experience at Fort Mason, drawing on an anime-inflected aesthetic that became a signature of the brand ¹¹¹.

Beyond design work, Patel gave talks on topics including design fundamentals, growth hacking, and mental models for designers, sharing recordings through his personal site ¹². His portfolio from the buildspace era also includes side projects such as Spectreseek, Alterok, Gaudmire, Erevald, and Dunbar, along with a Dream Team NFT collection and the Covers Gallery project ¹¹.

Patel held the Head of Design role from March 2022 through buildspace's closure in September 2024 ³². He describes his practice as spanning design, code, and storytelling: "I don't like to bucket myself into one category but I design, I code, I tell stories. I create experiences. Ultimately, all of my work is geared towards making people feel" ¹.

Founders, Inc. (2025–present)

On April 22, 2025, Patel announced he was joining Founders, Inc. as Creative Director and Partner ⁴. The post described watching "one empty room stretch into a 42k sq ft playground for builders" over three years at Fort Mason and credited Furqan Rydhan as "our first and biggest believer" during the buildspace days ⁴. His title has been Creative Director and Partner since March 2025 ²³.

At f.inc Patel describes his role as "shaping narratives that help us discover and back the world's most ambitious founders" ². He also designed the f.inc website ¹¹. He continues to live in San Francisco, though he spends one to two months each year in India ¹.

Four cornerstone programs

By April 2026, Patel had designed four cornerstone programs for Founders, Inc.: Off Season, Blueprint, Artifact, and Canopy ⁵.

Off Season is a six-week summer program for college students, recent graduates, and dropouts ¹³. The first cohort selected 48 teams to build on the Fort Mason campus; projects ranged from elevator robots and wildfire detection systems to multiplayer music platforms and autonomous drones ¹⁴.

Blueprint is a six-week fall program focused on hardware and physical AI, bringing founders to a shared lab on campus ¹³. The first cohort brought 50 hardware builders to San Francisco, producing projects including tabletop metal 3D printers, robotic arms for agricultural automation, and modular robotics for physical AI ¹⁵.

Artifact runs at the beginning of the year as a six-week program for founders starting their journey ¹³.

Canopy — the fourth program, announced in March 2026 — runs for five weeks and is the first f.inc program to combine software, hardware, and media under one roof ⁶. It accepts 100 teams at the San Francisco campus and 400 teams online, with weekly sessions from billion-dollar startup founders, $50K in credits for all participants, and up to $250K in funding for top teams ⁶¹⁶. Patel framed the media track as addressing founders who "kept showing up" at f.inc events — creators with millions of subscribers, self-funded filmmakers, and two-person media brands — who had no dedicated program path before Canopy ⁷.

References

1. About — stavanp.com(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
2. Stavan Patel — LinkedIn(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
3. Stavan Patel — Creative Director, Partner at Founders, Inc. — The Org(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
4. stavan on X — 'i have some news' (April 22, 2025)(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
5. Stavan Patel LinkedIn post — four cornerstone programs (April 9, 2026)