Our team helped launch Sequoia's Arc program and build a community around it.
We brought Sequoia's vision for their Arc program to life with a dynamic, narrative-driven, (and award-winning) experience that catches the attention of founders.
Cultivating community for a VC giant
One of the world’s largest venture capital firms, Sequoia is renowned for investing early in small startups you may or may not have heard of: You know, Apple, Google, and Zoom, to name a few.
But they’re not just resting on their legacy — Sequoia is still actively expanding into new markets, specifically in Europe.
As part of that effort, they’ve launched Arc, a program to help European seed-stage founders add value to their companies. We helped them turn up the volume on the program’s debut, with a less-than-standard form submission site infused with story and flow down the screen.
Movement and a little magic
Rather than going with a standard (read: boring and typically limited) submission-style, form-like application, Sequoia wanted something more: Something designed to ease applicants’ journeys while at the same time being a dynamic, self-contained experience designed to catch founders’ attention.
We brought the firm’s concepts to life using our collaborative content design process and mixing insight from our UX experts and digital design staff to create animations, transitions, and movement through the experience that added meaning and utility rather than flying by as flashy noise.
Fitting the framework
Sequoia chose Edgar Allan for this project for a few reasons. First, because of our experience in the VC space — we'd previously worked with Accel, Spark, General Catalyst, and WonderCo.
Second, because of our knowledge and expertise within Webflow. And finally, because of our recently launched Knockout framework, which would make it possible to get the project done in record time: just a few short weeks.
And Knockout didn’t just help us build the site quickly — it also helped Sequoia’s design team accurately describe what they wanted, which cut down on back-and-forth and kept everyone on track.
Now accepting applications
In just two weeks (!!), we created a beautiful, functional form for founders, a project that lands somewhere between a microsite and an application. JavaScript hooks work in the background to help with form submission. The response from founders has been stellar, and applications have been pouring in since launch.
Winner of the 2022 Webflow Award for Visual Aesthetic
In the end, we’re thrilled to have partnered with Sequoia’s design team to bring a beautiful, functional form to life for founders.
The collaborative, community-led nature of Webflow and the Webflow community is precisely what makes it possible for teams like ours to continue pushing the web forward on projects like these, and we’re excited to share the honor of a 2022 Webflow design award with Sequioa’s Design Lab for the work.
