ABOUT PONDER
We are a small group of talented filmmakers, deeply technical engineers, and creative technologists from NYU ITP based in New York City crafting a video creation tool for creative professionals.
Founded by Timothy Wang (creative technologist @ITP, exited founder & filmmaker) and Tim Tan (full-stack engineer, YouTuber, ex-Amazon, Karat, and graduate of Georgia Tech)
Our mission is to make creating video lightning fast, with creative control. We raised $2.5M from top VCs to do so.
We’re backed by Matt Hartman (the first investor of Hugging Face), Emery Wells (founder of Frame.io, exited to Adobe for $1.4B), Aaron Levie (CEO of Box), and many other institutional investors, filmmakers, and creators.
More on our story here.
THESIS
Our wedge is to solve real video manipulation (rough cut generation, auto-filling clips as you’re editing, video-inpainting, video2video) before adding more generative capabilities. This is what creative professionals want today. We believe manipulation of real video gives them—and us—the most control.
The UX of video creation will look vastly different from existing software.
- How will people create/manipulate media via variation, selection, and language?
- How will the medium itself change?
- How do we create an entirely new interface that feels familiar and helps users enter creative flow with zero technical barriers?f
If you’re already pondering these questions and love not just creating software interfaces but the philosophical ideas of how humans and computers should interact—especially in the age of AI—and almost love making art more than software, you should apply to be our founding designer.
We have 25,000+ creatives who’ve signed up for our waitlist and are eager to use the software you design.
THE ROLE
As founding designer, you will own 100% of Ponder’s design. You’ll create Ponder’s mockups, design systems, UI/UX, and influence our branding and team culture.
The pay will be $100-140K & flexible depending on experience, with founding team level equity. We work fully in-person in our midtown office six days a week.
What we’re looking for
- You are not just a UI designer; you’re an artist who wants to create new things. This excites you—not just art, but delightful interactions and experiences that make hearts melt as people interact with the tool you create.
- You want a challenge. We promise to give our best shot at changing the world with the software you design. You must promise to give it your all—this will be your mission, not a job.
- We love creative technologists who can solve problems end to end.
- You design with deeply ingrained reasoning as the foundation that enables creativity. You obsess over talking with customers.
- Ability to bring your ideas to life through prototyping. Bonus if you can develop front-end elements.
If you want to work with the most talented, passionate people on creating something new that’ll change how people create videos, please send me your portfolio/GitHub along with a few sentences on why you want to join Ponder.
You can reach me at timothy@ponder.ai