Raphael Schaad - Designer, Engineer, Builder
YC Visiting Partner / Founder / Designer-Engineer
Raphael
Schaad
The Swiss kid who ran through forests and ended up shipping the apps you use every day.
The Swiss kid who ran through forests and ended up shipping the apps you use every day.
The valley where Raphael Schaad grew up in Switzerland does not have a famous tech scene. It has mountains, forests, and the particular kind of stillness that makes you want to build something just to break it. He broke quite a few things on his way out.
He is not the kind of person who stumbles into iconic products. When Raphael joined the Flipboard team in early 2011, he flew in from Switzerland and started work the very next day - in the garage where the company was born. That detail matters. It is the posture of someone who shows up already running.
Before Flipboard, there was Tokyo and iA Writer - the writing app that convinced a generation of people that minimalism was not a design trend but a feature. The monospaced font. The single purpose. The refusal to give the user a toolbar they did not need. Raphael worked with Information Architects to launch it in 2010, and it set a template for software that knows what it is.
Four years at Flipboard building the personal magazine app that briefly made the iPad feel like the future. Then his own bet: Cron, a calendar built the way calendars should have been built the first time. Clean. Fast. Thoughtful. Everything the default calendar apps were not.
The Cron story has a detail worth lingering on. Notion CEO Ivan Zhao did not acquire Cron after a pitch or a banker's introduction. He acquired it because he was already using it as his personal calendar. The acquisition followed the product's quality, not the other way around. That is a particular kind of win.
After the acquisition, Raphael became Head of Design for Connected Apps and Growth at Notion, where he grew what became Notion Calendar to millions of active users. Then Y Combinator came calling - not as a program to join (he had already done that, as a founder in the W20 batch), but as a partner role. One of nine exceptional founders selected as Visiting Partners to help the next wave of builders in the AI era.
He describes himself on Mastodon as "a Swiss designer and MIT engineer who runs through forests." That sentence is doing a lot of work. It contains a career, a geography, a personality, and a philosophy - all in fourteen words. That kind of compression is exactly what makes him valuable to the founders he mentors.
"Software ate the world, and now AI is eating software - the founders building in this shift will redefine how we compute, work, and live."- Raphael Schaad, on joining Y Combinator as Visiting Partner
Most engineers build software. Raphael builds artifacts. Things that feel inevitable once you've used them, that make everything before seem like a draft. Here is the evidence.
A writing tool built in Tokyo with Information Architects that stripped the word processor down to its essence - a cursor, a font, a blank page. iA Writer won an Apple Design Award and spawned an entire genre of "distraction-free" writing apps. Its influence is visible in every minimal editor that came after it. Raphael contributed to its launch at a moment when most writing software was trying to be everything at once.
Raphael flew to San Francisco from Switzerland and started at Flipboard the next morning - in the garage where it began. He spent four years there helping build what became one of the most downloaded apps of the iPad era, and shipped FLAnimatedImage, an open-source performant GIF engine that became the most popular iOS GIF library on GitHub. Used by countless top App Store apps without ever making headlines - the best kind of infrastructure.
Calendar apps are a commodity. Raphael treated them as an unsolved design problem. Cron raised $3.5M from Initialized Capital with backing from Figma CEO Dylan Field and former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. It won Product Hunt's 2021 Productivity App of the Year. But the real moment was when Ivan Zhao, Notion's CEO, became a personal user. The acquisition was not a transaction - it was a validation. Notion acquired Cron in June 2022 for an 8-figure sum and Raphael grew what became Notion Calendar to millions of active users.
Notion's CEO didn't acquire Cron after seeing a pitch deck. He acquired it because he was already using it as his personal calendar. The product earned the deal, not the deck.
Raphael's central argument - the one he makes at YC, on podcasts, and in articles - is simple and almost always ignored: design is not polish. It is not the thing you do after the product works. It is the foundation of how you build.
He has a line that cuts through the usual startup advice: "Everything around you has been designed, either deliberately or accidentally. The best founders choose deliberately." That word - deliberately - is the whole argument. Intentionality at every step, from the first sketch to the final product. Not taste as decoration. Taste as strategy.
At Y Combinator, this is the lens he brings to founders building in the AI era. The tools are new. The underlying principle is old: if your product does not feel like it was designed by someone who cared, it will not feel like something worth using. That remains true even when AI is generating the code.
Intentionality at every step, from the first sketch to the final product, separates good companies from iconic ones.
Everything around you has been designed, either deliberately or accidentally. The best founders choose deliberately.
Founders should think about design first, not last. Not as a layer of polish you add before launch, but as the foundation of how you build.
Software ate the world, and now AI is eating software - the founders building in this shift will redefine how we compute, work, and live.
A performant animated GIF engine for iOS, built at Flipboard and open-sourced. Became the most popular iOS GIF library on GitHub. Millions of users in top App Store apps have run his code without knowing his name. That is infrastructure working correctly.
Featured in Y Combinator's Startup Library for "Why Every Founder Should Care About Design" and "Design Experts Critique AI Interfaces." His frameworks for thinking about design reach thousands of early-stage founders per year.
Advisory board member at Swisspreneur Syndicate. Active in bridging the Swiss and Silicon Valley startup ecosystems. Angel investor in Nexus (YC F25), an enterprise AI agent platform. The mountain kid who came back with receipts.
"Writing a statement of objectives gives them clarity" - it helps you understand "how everything you have done thus far leads up to this next step, and what you now need to do in order to take that step."- Raphael Schaad, on goal-setting and intentionality (from his MIT Media Lab application advice on Medium)
Episode 272 - "Cron: The Next-Gen Calendar" - Raphael on the full journey from founding Cron in Switzerland to Y Combinator to acquisition by Notion. Listen on Swisspreneur.org or major podcast platforms.
Raphael was part of Y Combinator as a founder in the W20 batch. He now returns as a Visiting Partner. Very few people get to sit on both sides of that table.
Switzerland (raised, educated), Tokyo (iA Writer), San Francisco (Flipboard, Cron, YC). His career arc spans three continents and three distinct design cultures.
He flew from Switzerland and started at Flipboard the very next day. That is a posture, not a schedule. It is the same energy that got Cron to millions of users and into Notion's product suite.