Dylan Babbs, Co-Founder and CTO of Profound, represents a rare breed in tech: the design engineer turned founder who went from redesigning Uber’s navigation system to co-founding New York’s newest AI marketing unicorn in just 18 months. His journey from maps and data visualization to helping Fortune 500 companies stay visible in an AI-driven world reveals what happens when deep craft meets entrepreneurial ambition.

At a glance…

Dylan describes his philosophy of not compromising on quality even when scaling rapidly, believing that design serves as a company’s “front door” and first impression that can kickstart the entire growth flywheel. He advocates for hiring younger, passionate employees over experience alone, noting that Profound’s average age is around 26-27 and that all current department heads joined as individual contributors before growing into leadership roles. The company operated with a mandatory six-day work week for the first 14 months, trading time for the ability to maintain hiring standards and product quality. Dylan explains that AI represents a new customer that every brand must serve, fundamentally changing how companies approach digital visibility from search optimization to “Answer Engine Optimization.” He emphasizes that successful AI product design requires specialization in at least two of three areas: visual design craft, product design for business impact, and design engineering implementation. The agent builder platform demonstrates Profound’s evolution from analytics to a full “workbench” where marketers can create, orchestrate, and automate AI-powered workflows at scale. Dylan argues that inflection points like the rise of LLMs create opportunities for new companies to succeed where existing defenses no longer apply, advising founders to be mercenaries rather than missionaries when choosing what to build.

From designer to founder: the path beyond traditional design roles

Dylan’s transition from design engineer at Uber to co-founder reflects a broader evolution in how designers can leverage their skills. “I never really liked having to just not make things real,” he explains, describing how his informatics background combining design and engineering led him to always want to bring designs to life with code and real data. His four years at Uber, redesigning navigation systems and programmatically building 256 design system components, taught him that design principles must serve business metrics. The founding journey involved two years of failed side projects before landing on Profound, driven by what he calls the desire to “advance your own skills” and avoid looking back with regret about missing the AI inflection point.

Design as company DNA and competitive advantage

Profound’s investment in design from day one stems from both personal passion and strategic necessity. “If you’re a potential customer looking at Profound, the first thing you’re going to see is the website. It’s the front door,” Dylan explains. In the anxiety-filled AI space, premium design experiences build trust with enterprise customers. The investment creates a hiring advantage since top designers don’t want to work for founders who don’t take the craft seriously. Dylan frames this as exploiting a unique advantage: “We’re all designers here. If you want to actually invest in your own design capabilities, it’s going to be very hard to attract that talent if it’s not already in your DNA.”

AI as customer: designing for artificial intelligence alongside humans

Dylan’s most provocative thesis is that “every company on the planet just got a new customer: AI.” This reframes design from human-centered to intelligence-centered, though he argues the principles remain similar since AI models are trained on human preferences. “You’re not designing directly for the human, but you’re designing for something that represents the human,” he notes. This shift manifests in Profound’s core product: helping brands optimize how they appear in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other platforms. The design challenge becomes creating interfaces that help marketers understand and control their representation to artificial intelligence systems.

[Demo] Agent builder: from simple automations to complex marketing workflows

Dylan demonstrates Profound’s agent builder, starting with a simple “poem writer” that takes an animal input and generates poetry, then scaling it through their sheets interface to process hundreds of requests simultaneously. The workflow builder resembles tools like Zapier but integrates Profound’s proprietary data about brand visibility in AI systems and fine-tuned models for marketing content. “You get the Profound special sauce in here,” he explains, showing how agents can scrape existing content, apply brand voice from knowledge bases, generate new articles, send Slack notifications for approval, and publish to WordPress automatically. The interface balances flexibility with clarity, using node-based visual programming while offering AI assistance to build workflows through natural language.

Scaling quality: hiring for passion over years of experience

Profound’s hiring philosophy prioritizes four intangibles over traditional experience metrics: ownership, curiosity, being a good person, and willingness to work hard. “If you’re just a boring person, you’re not going to be good at Profound,” Dylan states, describing how he asks candidates about their passions to assess genuine enthusiasm. The company deliberately hires younger employees who are “very malleable, willing to learn, willing to work a lot” and provides strong direction to normalize any experience gaps. This approach has created a team where all current department heads joined as individual contributors and grew into leadership roles within six months, proving the strategy of “getting people that get it” rather than defaulting to senior hires.

The three pillars of design at Profound: craft, business impact, and implementation

Dylan identifies three essential design capabilities at Profound: visual design craft, product design for business impact, and design engineering to make things real. Every designer must excel in at least two areas. He emphasizes that product design means “designing to make money, designing for the business,” drawing from his Uber experience optimizing rider pickup flows to reduce cancellations and dwelling time. “Your ability to create output as a designer is all about making money,” he argues, rejecting the pure user-centered design mindset in favor of understanding business metrics. Visual craft remains the baseline expectation, while design engineering encompasses both technical implementation and animation work that brings interfaces to life.

From six-day weeks to systematic scaling without compromising standards

Profound’s early growth strategy involved a mandatory six-day work week for the first 14 months, trading time for the ability to maintain high hiring standards with limited capital. “You basically have limited resources, so you just have to work a lot,” Dylan explains. As the company scaled to 155 employees, they shifted focus to systematic culture building and process creation. “Company building is all about creating systems,” he notes, describing how early decisions about quality and craft become embedded in team culture. The challenge became ensuring that employee decision-making aligns with founder values without direct oversight, achieved through careful hiring and cultural reinforcement rather than rigid processes.

Finding inflection points: why timing and market shifts matter more than passion projects

Dylan advocates for a “mercenary” rather than “missionary” approach to founding, choosing opportunities based on market inflection points rather than personal passion alone. “You always have to have an inflection point of something changing,” he argues, citing Profound’s timing with the ChatGPT launch as crucial for breaking through existing market defenses. He warns against the temptation to build in familiar domains like design tools, noting that “everybody’s doing that” and competition is fierce. The key insight: “You generally don’t want to swim upstream. You want to swim downstream and ride the wave.” This philosophy led him and co-founder James Cadwallader away from multiple other ideas toward the AI marketing opportunity, despite neither having deep marketing backgrounds initially.

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Dylan Babbs - Co-Founder & CTO of Profound

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