Diego Segura
Designer, Founder in Lower Manhattan
Most recently, I founded and directed design at NATION.
We raised $4MM from Placeholder, M13, Slow, Tribe, and Circle Ventures, and built Caro (a breakthrough e-commerce auction system), and Vellum (an e-signature and payment escrow solution to make DocuSign obsolete).
After deciding to split from my co-founder, I left in early 2023. The company and products are still operating.
Prior to founding NATION, I led brand strategy, naming, and design at Waybridge, working under CEOs Brian O'Kelley and then Scott Evans. The company has since been acquired.
Before Waybridge, I was the youngest design hire at COLLINS in New York, where I worked on the rebrands of Medium, Match.com, Warner Music Group, and Simon Sinek's The Optimism Company, among others.
In 2018, I dropped out of high school after writing my book, The Dropout Manifesto. You can buy the book on Amazon.
Projects
Vellum applies smart contracts on real contracts, and build financial transactions directly into the legal agreements they are tied to. Created in collaboration with Gerald Gallagher, a Web3 lawyer-turned-product-builder, Vellum aimed to be a utilitarian, consumer use of smart contracts for more than DeFi.
Digital advertising is making a climate mess — and it’s completely in our control. Scope3 has set out to right the course, and now after 18 months launch a new brand and product to reveal some groundbreaking tests that show how strong of an impact Scope3 is already making for both advertisers and publishers to clean up their ad stacks.
Working with co-founders Armaan Kalsi and Brihu Sundararaman, we redesigned the Lore Explorer. The changes are progressively rolling out during their beta.
In less than 30 days, Lore's redesigned block explorer received 67,000 signups, and on the momentum of Lore's progress, in August 2023, they raised a $2.3MM funding round from SALT, Arca, Balaji Srinivasan, and Floodgate.
Independent brand identity work for Bonside, a breakthrough in alternative financing for brick & mortar businesses.
Bestselling author, speaker, and organizational leader Simon Sinek publishes many ideas through The Optimism Company. With COLLINS, we worked through the naming of this new publishing arm, wrote the brand strategy, and designed the identity system.
While at COLLINS, I worked on Medium's 2021 brand identity, which included a new — and controversial — logo, typographic illustrations, and a new layout system.
Work Experience
Writing
I published this 173-page treatise before dropping out of high school at the age of 17. It outlined a an approach to self-education and growth outside of institutions, and aimed to be a guide for young people navigating their early-adult life.