My daughter had just been born, and I wanted to be able to answer her honestly one day when she asked what I did when I knew the world needed changing. I decided then that the answer would be everything I could.

Sixteen years later that compass is still what I follow.

The journey hasn’t been straight. I’ve founded two startups of my own and worked inside three others. Each one taught me things that client work never could. How to value what I offer. How much I’m capable of when the brief is big enough. What happens when product market fit is missing and leadership looks away. What it feels like to sit with a founder at 2am trying to figure out if any of this is going to work.

I’ve also had years where nothing was clear. Where the struggle was very real and the self-belief took a serious knock. I’m not sharing that for sympathy. I’m sharing it because I know what it feels like to be mid-flight, uncertain, carrying the weight of something you believe in without knowing if it’s going to work. That experience lives in how I show up for the founders I work with.

I live in Cape Town, one of the most beautiful places on earth, and I take full advantage. The mountains, the ocean, the fynbos. I run, I surf, I hike. I meditate most mornings. I practice yoga. I read widely and have the kinds of conversations that go on too long and leave you changed. My family, my friends, my community, they are the foundation everything else is built on.

All of that feeds the work. Because this has never been about design for its own sake. It’s about using every tool available, strategy, product thinking, UX, brand, facilitation, creative direction, to help purpose-led founders build the things the world actually needs.

That’s what Seed is. A practice built on 25 years of accumulated judgment, a genuine belief that we can build a world worth inheriting, and a deep desire to do it alongside people who feel it as much as I do.

If that sounds like you, I’d love to talk.

Lee Rael, Founder