When I created this season of Growthmates — The Creator’s Path — I was looking for people who do not just work in tech, but who genuinely live as creators. People who do not wait for permission. People who treat their career as something they can design. My conversation with Felix Haas was exactly that.
Felix Haas is an entrepreneur, designer, investor, and part of the team at Lovable. But what stood out to me was not the number of roles he has had (and there have been many). What stood out was his philosophy. Very early in the conversation, he said something that shaped the entire episode:
“I think entrepreneurship is a way of living”.
Felix Haas (Lovable)
For Felix, entrepreneurship is not about having a startup. It is not about a title on LinkedIn. It is about responsibility. It is about understanding that your environment, your career, and your trajectory are outcomes of your decisions. If you are not changing something, you are choosing it. That mindset alone reframes everything.
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Welcome to the season of Growthmates — The Creator’s Path
This episode of Growthmates — The Creator’s Path is about people who don’t wait for permission.
I was looking for people who do not fit neatly into predefined job descriptions, who design roles before they formally exist, and who treat life as something they can consciously architect rather than passively inherit. Felix is one of them.
He never planned to become a designer, and he certainly did not follow a linear corporate ladder. Instead, he chose to experiment extensively with his career. Over the years, he has held 18 different positions across agencies, corporate environments, startups, venture capital, angel investing, and various side projects.
He did not move through these roles because he was lost. He did it because he was testing.
You are the CEO of your own environment
Felix does not sharply separate “founder” and “employee.” At Lovable, he is not technically one of the founders. Yet he operates with a founder mindset. He takes ownership end-to-end. He thinks systemically. He does not wait for permission to improve something.
He describes entrepreneurship as the ability to design your life. You can design your job. You can design your environment. You can design the people you surround yourself with. But to do that, you need to stop seeing roles as fixed boxes.
One of my favorite stories from the episode was how he visualized joining a venture capital firm before it happened. He screenshotted their team page and added himself into it in Figma. No one saw it. It was not a public manifestation. It was internal alignment.
By the time he spoke with the partners, he did not feel like a candidate trying to get in. He felt like someone who already belonged, and eventually, he did join them. He explained it simply: if you do not believe the role exists for you, why would anyone else believe it?
Why should startups hire founders?
Felix strongly believes that startups should hire people with a founder mentality, even if they are joining as employees. He does not define this by title, he defines it by behavior.
Founders think end-to-end. They move with urgency, take responsibility, they care deeply about outcomes. However, what makes Lovable interesting is that they do not cage those people. They allow side projects.
This might sound counterintuitive in traditional corporate environments where outside work is often restricted. But Felix sees curiosity as a superpower. People who build side projects expand their thinking. They explore. They experiment. That makes them better at their core job, not worse.
You cannot hire ambitious, entrepreneurial people and then expect them to stop being curious.
Make decisions. Even wrong ones.
Felix has worked in a massive German corporation with over 60,000 employees. He has built and exited projects. He ran a design agency, worked in hypergrowth startups, invested and experimented constantly. And walked away from things that no longer fit.
He shared a belief that stayed with me:
“Not making a decision is worse than making a bad one”
Felix Haas (Lovable)
A bad decision teaches you. It gives you data. It sharpens your intuition. Avoiding decisions keeps you stagnant. This is especially important for high performers who overthink their next move. Clarity rarely comes from thinking alone. It comes from movement.
The moment everything changes
Toward the end of our conversation, Felix said something that I believe every aspiring creator needs to hear:
“The moment you start building something, the moment you start putting something out there and people realize that — they’re gonna help you”.
Felix Haas (Lovable)
While you are invisible, it is easy to be ignored. The moment you create and publish, something shifts. Support appears, feedback appears, conversations start, confidence does not come first. Action does and support often follows courage, not the other way around.
What inspires him today
At Lovable, Felix sees something powerful happening. He sees people who never considered themselves builders becoming builders.
He told me about a woman in her mid-forties who works as an English teacher. She does not have a computer science degree.
She has never been through an accelerator. But she built her own educational app for her students. That story moves him more than another experienced founder launching yet another startup. Because if she can build, others can too and that is the shift we are living through.
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Lovable: https://lovable.dev
Mastering Lovable Playbook: https://designplusai.com/p/mastering-lovable-playbook
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