Designer Fund · Oct 13, 2026 · 54m · 46m saved
With Luke Shiels, Founder and CEO of Interfere
An AI code review of Interfere's codebase guessed it belonged to a company of 500 to 600 people with a dedicated security team. Interfere had five.
Luke Shiels, founder and CEO of Interfere, on Designer Fund, explained why he built his startup the slow way. Most startups ship fast, collect users and fix things later. Luke argues that a company trying to replace tools people already use can't win that way.
"It's not 2010 anymore and we're not building Uber... our moat is actually convincing people to replace existing tooling that they have with a better way to work." — Luke Shiels
Luke landed his first tech job while training as a commercial airline pilot in Poland, and later became a founding design engineer at Tabs. He started Interfere after finding that about half his working time went to keeping software running rather than building it.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 54 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 principles that matter.
Key Takeaways
Maintenance eats engineering time, and tools for software after deployment have not kept pace with the rest
Interfere finds production bugs, ranks them and can fix them itself
Humans should remove and simplify; AI should only improve what is left, because models default to adding code
A 5-person team built security an AI reviewer mistook for a 500 to 600 person company's
Luke treats small details as a signal of how a company handles what customers can't see
Interfere hires for give-a-shit-itis, its name for caring about work you put your name to
Shipping in 2 weeks does not matter when users face switching costs, so Interfere is built to be better, not first
1. Pilot School to Startups
Luke grew up in Ireland with little interest in school and went straight from high school to commercial pilot training in Poland, starting in 2020. That was a bad year for aviation, and weather kept disrupting his flying hours.
Luke Shiels paid his way with design skills he had taught himself as a teenager
By 13 he was selling Photoshop and Illustrator flyers online, and at 16 he was running a small freelance business. A Figma-based Upwork job building a marketing landing page turned into a full-time remote role. He flew in Poland in the mornings and worked US hours in the afternoons.
That routine started his tech career. It led to a role as founding design engineer at Tabs, which automates contract and invoice billing, and a brief stint at Delphi.
