Robin McIntosh and the business of saying yes

A brochure is a modest place to begin an entrepreneurial career. It comes with folds, a deadline and very little of the grandeur associated with founding a company. For Robin McIntosh, accepting a brochure assignment helped set SIREN in motion. The scale of the invitation mattered less than her willingness to take it. Years later, her résumé would include design studios, magazine work, company leadership and board responsibilities. The small commission remains a useful opening scene: somebody needed something made, and she said yes.

McIntosh co-founded Workit Health with Lisa McLaughlin in 2015. She shared its chief executive role, later became sole CEO, and subsequently served as chair. Today she is co-founder and CEO of Avela Health. Those titles describe an executive career. Her earlier work reveals the designer underneath it, someone accustomed to asking how an idea will look, how it will behave and whether another person can actually use it.

There is a pleasing mismatch between the tidy vocabulary of a biography and the untidy business of making one. A job title arrives looking settled. A new project usually arrives with questions. McIntosh’s career is interesting in the space between the two: the brief before the business, the partnership before the organization chart, the prototype before anybody agrees what the company ought to become.

The brochure before the business card

Entrepreneurship was familiar territory in McIntosh’s family. Her parents ran businesses and encouraged her to back her own judgment. Her father urged her to take opportunities as they appeared. That upbringing offers some context for the brochure assignment. A small piece of paid work could be worth accepting without a guarantee that it would lead anywhere grander.

Her education included the University of Michigan and graphic design studies at California College of the Arts. She also worked at WIRED and IDEO in San Francisco. The combination put her in contact with words, images, technology and the practical business of explaining an idea. These are useful ingredients for a designer. They are useful for founders too, whose first task is often persuading someone else to understand a thing that barely exists.

McIntosh and Kate Harris started SIREN in 2012. Its work crossed branding, visual communication and interaction design. A studio has to make those disciplines cooperate: a name that sounds promising still needs a usable product, and an elegant screen still needs to tell the right story. The attraction of this work is also its inconvenience. Every assignment supplies another set of constraints.

Design offers plenty of occasions for confidence to meet reality. The client has a view. The user has a different one. The deadline has no interest in either. Seen through that lens, running a studio is a fairly direct education in entrepreneurship. The work must leave the designer’s desk and survive contact with other people.

A cipher, a wordmark, a different kind of brief

One SIREN project makes the connection between design and explanation especially clear. Numerai asked the studio to create its visual identity. The company organized an artificial intelligence tournament around stock-market prediction, using encrypted data. That is quite a mouthful to hand a prospective audience. The design problem was to give an abstract proposition a recognizable visual form.

The studio built a cipher-like identity and a corresponding wordmark. Its black-and-white treatment referred to the environment of raw data. McIntosh, Harris and SIREN are credited together on the project, published in September 2016. The shared credit matters: the portfolio preserves a piece of collaborative work, rather than inviting us to imagine a lone founder having every idea.

A wordmark cannot explain an entire company. It can establish a first impression and give the larger explanation somewhere to begin. In that sense, the Numerai brief offers a compact example of the work McIntosh’s studio was doing: finding a visual language for an unfamiliar proposition. The business had its technical vocabulary. The audience needed a way in.

Her portfolio also includes editorial work for WIRED, a project called The New Lunchroom and a racquetball project. The range is a reminder that a founder’s professional history can contain more variety than the latest company biography allows. An archive of actual work has a welcome habit of making a résumé less solemn.

Building the thing before raising the money

Workit began in McIntosh’s Oakland apartment. She and McLaughlin worked around her dining table, researching their idea and trying different approaches. They spent time understanding the problem before settling on a solution. Before receiving outside funding, they bootstrapped their way to a working prototype and tested it with consumers.

The dining table is a familiar prop in startup stories, sometimes polished by repetition until it resembles a piece of sacred furniture. The more useful detail here is what happened around it: research, experiments and testing. A room becomes a company through work. Its domestic charm does very little of the heavy lifting.

For a designer moving into company building, a prototype has particular value. It makes an argument tangible. People can respond to something they can see and try. Their reactions may be awkward, inconvenient or entirely different from what the founders hoped. That is useful information to receive while there is still time to change the design.

McIntosh has spoken warmly about McLaughlin’s abilities and the energy of those early investigations. That gives the origin story a collaborative center. The company emerged from two people working through questions together. There would eventually be investors, employees and board responsibilities. First there was the much smaller task of discovering whether their idea could work.

Two names at the top

McIntosh and McLaughlin shared the CEO title. Their arrangement attracted questions from investors, and McIntosh defended the value of making decisions together. Her explanation was direct: “We believe that consensus drives the best innovation.” It is a statement about how she wanted to work, and a useful counterweight to the conventional founder portrait, in which decisiveness tends to get a much larger speaking part than consultation.

“We believe that consensus drives the best innovation.”

Robin McIntosh

There were financial principles alongside the leadership philosophy. McIntosh described keeping cash flow more conservative than some peers and avoiding the assumption that another funding round would always be available. Her family’s caution about borrowing against the future carried into the company. That is a less glamorous subject than a launch announcement, though payroll generally appreciates it.

The leadership structure also changed. In 2022, McIntosh became sole CEO after years of sharing the position. By 2024, she was publicly describing her sequence of responsibilities as co-CEO, CEO and chair. The changes give the story an important sense of movement. A choice made at the beginning of a company need not become an unalterable article of faith.

Her own description of those titles gave the staff the credit. In a public reflection on Workit, she emphasized the people doing its daily work. Founders are conspicuous; organizations depend on many people whose names rarely reach a headline. Acknowledging that is a useful habit for someone who has occupied several of the most visible seats.

The designer takes a seat in the boardroom

Recognition followed the company-building years. McIntosh was named a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2019. In September 2022, she and McLaughlin received the Michigan Venture Capital Association’s Entrepreneur of the Year award. The association separately recognized Workit with its Financing of the Year award that evening.

Those are different forms of recognition: one concerned with social entrepreneurship, another with a regional entrepreneurial community. Together they show how far her work had traveled from a studio assignment. They also locate her career in networks of founders, investors and institutions. Companies are often narrated as individual achievements; awards ceremonies have a way of revealing the crowded room.

She has continued speaking about design and business strategy, with appearances at institutions including Yale, Stanford and Berkeley. Her 2024 Berkeley forum biography brought her studio background and executive experience into the same short account. For an audience concerned with corporate governance, that combination offers a different route into the subject of how organizations make decisions.

Another company, another beginning

Avela brings McIntosh back into a founder’s operating role. Her co-founder Kate Monti had worked with her at Workit. The new partnership therefore draws on an existing professional relationship. In a February 2026 corporate filing, McIntosh signed as Avela’s chief executive officer. The signature is a small, definite marker of the current chapter.

On August 10, 2026, she was among eleven honorees at the California Woman Founder of the Year event in Sacramento. The program began with a reception at the California Museum, followed by recognition in the State Senate and Assembly. She appeared on the honorees’ list alongside founders working across food, manufacturing, finance and other businesses.

It is an appropriately varied company for a designer whose work has crossed so many kinds of brief. McIntosh once put her approach to entrepreneurship in a short question: “why not?!” The question has room for curiosity and a little nerve. Her career adds the necessary follow-up: accept the assignment, find collaborators, make something people can examine, and keep working when the interesting idea acquires a deadline.