Founding Designer (Co-Founder)

Location: flexible (US or Europe)
Type: Full-time, Founding Team Member
Equity: Competitive founding team equity package

About thragma

thragma is the voice-powered memory platform. We turn photos into 'living memory cards' combining image, your own voice, and music creating a searchable library of your memories that can inspire physical products and experiences. In an era flooded with AI-generated content, thragma preserves authentic human stories captured 10 times faster through voice and shared selectively rather than broadcast.

With 100+ customer interviews, 40 paying beta customers, 98% retention intent, and a 30+ NPS score, we've validated that people desperately need this.

We're at the intersection of a $234bn global market opportunity, starting with Digital Memories and expanding into Personality Data, Physical Creations, and memory-centric Third Spaces.

The Role

As our Founding Designer, you'll join as a co-founder defining the visual and emotional language of how people preserve their most precious memories.

You'll own all aspects of brand, design, and creative marketing: from the interface where people record their stories to the 'living memory cards' they hold in their hands.

This is a rare co-founder opportunity to build a creative foundation for a product that combines digital and physical, intimate and social, modern and timeless. You'll work directly with our founder, Charles, and Founding Engineer to create a brand that honors the weight of memory while feeling effortlessly contemporary.

What You'll Do

You will work directly with our Founder, our Founding Engineer, and our users to design the thragma brand. As a co-founder, you'll shape company culture, brand philosophy, and creative direction from day one.

Brand & Identity:

  • Define our complete visual identity, voice, and brand positioning

  • Create a design system that works across digital app, physical products, and third spaces

  • Establish brand guidelines that will scale as we grow from hundreds to millions of users

Product Design:

  • Design the end-to-end user experience for creating ‘living memory cards’

  • Design for the ritualistic nature of memory-keeping - creating a lifelong companion rather than a one-time tool

  • Make voice recording feel natural, not performative or awkward

  • Craft the visual presentation of photo + voice + music as a unified experience

  • Design sharing experiences that feel selective and meaningful, not broadcast

  • Create the physical artifacts that bridge digital memories into tangible keepsakes

Marketing & Growth:

  • Lead creative strategy for customer acquisition and retention

  • Design the waitlist experience and pre-launch marketing campaigns

  • Create content and campaigns that resonate with new parents, memory hoarders, and legacy-conscious families

  • Build creative viral growth loops within the product experience

What success looks like (first 12 months)

  • Users describe thragma as ‘beautiful’, ‘meaningful’, and ‘unlike anything else’

  • The design system scales across app, physical products, and third spaces without fragmentation

  • Creative output directly supports growth from 40 to 1,000+ customers

Who You Are

Required:

  • Design experience across brand, product, and marketing

  • Portfolio demonstrating both digital and physical design excellence

  • Excellent visual design skills and mastery of industry-standard tools (Figma, Adobe Creative Suite)

Bonus Points:

  • Experience at early-stage startups where you defined brand from scratch

  • Experience designing for voice or audio-based interfaces

  • Background in physical product design or print production

  • Personal practice in photography, memory-keeping, or storytelling that reflects an understanding of memory as creative expression

Why thragma

  • Solve a universal problem: Everyone has thousands of photos losing their context. You'll build the solution they wish existed.

  • True co-founder opportunity: Shape company culture, product philosophy, and strategic direction from day one.

  • Strong market validation: We have paying customers, strong retention, and clear product-market fit signals: now it's time to scale.

  • Mission-driven: This isn't about vanity metrics. Our customers tell us "I'd pay tens of thousands to get those memories back." The impact is real.

  • Backed by experts: Advisors include Harvard professors Michael Norton (Behavioral Science), Eva Ascarza (Marketing), and Rem Koning (Entrepreneurial Management).

Our Positioning:

We're creating a new product category: selectively social media. Not social media (broadcast focussed), not cloud storage (no context). We're the voice-powered memory platform that captures the human stories behind your photos, giving you a searchable and shareable memory library that preserves authentic human connection across generations.

Our differentiators:

  1. Authentic - not generated with AI

  2. A continuous companion through your life - not a one-time memento

  3. Context-filled memories which connect photos, your voice narrative, and music

  4. Selectively social - a private memory library where memories can be shared with others by choice, rather than broadcast by default

  5. Memories from your whole life are captured digitally in a way that can be re-lived at any time

  6. Physical and digital worlds connected - a digital memory library that inspires physical creations and in-person connections

Our Values

  • Voice-native: Memories live in how we tell them, capturing stories through natural conversation

  • Beautifully human: Designed for emotional moments where aesthetic quality matters as much as functionality - we are all artists of ourselves

  • Selectively social: Built as a private library first that can be shared rather than a broadcast channel

  • Contextually rich: Focused on capturing the 'why' behind moments, not just the 'what', and built to make the 'how' fun, creative, and fulfilling

  • Ritualistic: A new process for us to curate our memories over time, a lifelong companion

  • Authentic: A natural capture of the human experience without AI interference

  • Creative: Memory is a creative expression, we can all be artists

The Founder

Charles Graham (HBS MBA '26) studied Archaeology & Ancient History at Oxford, founded his first business at 16, operated as FTSE-250 c-suite executive for strategy & innovation, and writes a Substack on memory with paid subscribers. His father died before he was born so only a few mementos remain for half his history. This is personal.

Apply

Send the following to charles@thragma.com:

  • Portfolio (URL or PDF)

  • Your resume or LinkedIn

  • A brief note (3-5 minutes to read) about:

    • A creative project you're most proud of and the impact it had

    • Why now for thragma