Module 1 · Week 1
Think like a fucking capitalist
Reframe your work from craft to capital. Learn the four ways any business measures value, money, time, risk, and reputation, and how to lead with the right one.
You build → your Value Scorecard
Founding Cohort: Unignorable · Starts Sept 7 · Capped at 20
The best designer on the team and the best-paid designer are almost never the same person. Unignorable is the 6-week cohort that closes the gap. You’ll learn the business acumen, influence, and narrative that decide who gets promoted, who gets paid $250k to $350k, and who gets thanked and forgotten.
You know your users better than the PM. You catch the edge case the eng lead missed. You’ve shipped work you’re genuinely proud of.
And you keep watching people with worse ideas and better politics get the promotion, the headcount, the seat at the table you can’t get into.
You found out about the roadmap pivot two days ago. It shipped last Thursday. Nobody asked you. You present the work and someone senior nods, says “interesting,” and doesn’t do a goddamn thing about it.
You’re the most talented person in the room, and you’re losing anyway.
Here’s the part nobody says out loud: it’s not going to fix itself. The gap isn’t talent. Nobody taught you to explain what your work is worth, because design school and every portfolio course on earth pretends the work speaks for itself.
The work does not speak for itself. Someone has to speak for it. Right now that someone isn’t you, and it’s costing you a promotion cycle and six figures.
02 / The reframe
I spent years thinking the problem was the portfolio. I was wrong. The problem was influence.
How your company actually makes money, and how to tie your work to it in a sentence a VP feels.
How to read the room, build trust on purpose, and stop getting treated like an order taker.
How to re-tell the work you’ve already done as a business case that makes you impossible to pass over.
This is not a portfolio review. It is not “design thinking.” It’s the missing layer of influence, power, and politics.
I’ve taken laid-off senior designers, people who thought they’d have to step back in scope and comp just to get hired again, into total-comp offers at $305k and $350k. Same designer, different positioning and negotiation.
I spent two years pushing a funnel reorg that people ranked well above me fought the whole way. When it shipped, it lifted conversion around 30%, and in its first quarter it earned about $56 million. That’s the difference between doing good work and doing work the business can count. I’ll teach you exactly how I got it funded, defended, and promoted on.
A design founder working with me in an annual capacity signed an $80k deal within the first 30 days of working together. This is the operating system at the executive level. It doesn’t stop working when you get senior. It compounds.
You walk out with a stack of tools, plays, and knowledge you can use in your next 1:1, your next review, or your next job offer negotiation.
Sequenced on purpose: business acumen is the gate, everything after it ladders to the same result. From order taker to trusted expert.
Reframe your work from craft to capital. Learn the four ways any business measures value, money, time, risk, and reputation, and how to lead with the right one.
Turn your biggest project into a number and an analogy a C-level exec can actually feel. These are the same moves that turned my two-year design gamble into an 8-figure payout.
The Trust Framework, the Power Audit, and the Frame. Diagnose the trust you’re missing, map who really holds power, and learn to open a room as the expert instead of the order taker.
A five-step structure for any high-stakes ask, applied to the five that matter: a promotion, headcount, funding, prioritization, and a new job.
The brag doc and the quarterly highlights deck: the artifacts that keep your value visible instead of invisible. The weekly visibility rituals come as a downloadable toolkit. For job seekers, this doubles as your case-study layer.
Staying? Engineer the promotion so it’s a formality. Leaving? Position to compete for $250k to $350k, with a real preview of comp strategy.
You present your narrative and artifact stack, get it pressure-tested in front of the cohort, and leave with a plan you’ll actually run.
A 6-week group cohort of you working with other designers. New modules drop every week after kickoff, so you work through the modules and templates on your own schedule. You post your work in the cohort threads and get eyes on it from the room. Once a week there’s live office hours to bring your questions and your work. One kickoff, weekly office hours, everything else is yours to run at your pace.
Unignorable gives you the frameworks, the templates, and the cohort around you. That’s most of what most people need. When the work gets specific to your exact situation, that’s the private 1:1. Start here. You’ll know when you’re ready for more, and so will I.
$2,000 · 6-week cohort. Frameworks, templates, cohort threads, your artifact stack.
Private 12-week 1:1. Bespoke strategy and live negotiation surgery for your exact move. By application.
Private annual advisory for leaders already in a senior seat. By invitation.
The founding cohort
This is the lowest this will ever be. You’re getting the founder rate, and your feedback shapes what the product becomes.
Runs September 7 to October 16, 2026. Doors close Friday, September 4. Waitlist gets first access.
Apply for the founding cohortIncludes the full 6-week cohort, every pre-recorded module and template, the live kickoff and weekly office hours, the private cohort space, your complete artifact stack, and a complimentary Career & Comp diagnostic call to map your next 90 days. My 1:1 clients pay $7,500 to $10,000 for the bespoke version of this.
My guarantee is not a free trial. Do the work, post it every week, and if by the capstone you don’t have a value narrative and artifact stack you’d put in front of a VP, I’ll refund you in full. It’s a deal for people who show up.
I ran design as Head of Design at Crunchyroll, where I pushed our primary funnel redesign that earned around $56 million in its first quarter after two years of people above me resisting and telling me no.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of designers and coached senior ones into $305k and $350k roles. I run Dark UX Academy because the smartest designers I know keep getting steamrolled by people who are dumber, but for some reason are better at influence and politics, and nobody was teaching the part that actually decides it. I learned this the hard way, so you don’t have to. I’ve put all 18 years of it into this course: what works, what doesn’t, and what actually gets you paid, gets you trusted, and earns you an invite into the strategic decision-making.
I’m not going to teach you to make prettier work. You already can. I’m going to teach you how to make all your time, effort, sweat, and sacrifice actually make a fucking difference, and how to GET PAID for it along the way.