I didn’t meet Cris Dobbins at a pitch event.
I was helping a portfolio company figure out their design hire when I asked them a simple question: “What products do you admire?” They didn’t name a designer. They named HashiCorp. So I went looking for who built that experience. I found Cris.
She’d spent seven years shaping the design language for Terraform, Consul, and Vault. Infrastructure tools that somehow felt human. I convinced her to leave HashiCorp and join our portfolio company. And I’ve been waiting for her to build her own thing ever since.
Now she is. And I couldn’t be more excited to back Soffi with Motive Force Ventures.
Beautiful Software Compounds
At Motive Force, I look for three things: founders with unstoppable drive, markets at inflection points, and beautiful software. That last one matters more than people think.
Beautiful software isn’t just pretty. It’s thoughtfully architected, emotionally intelligent, and spreads organically because people can’t imagine working without it. I learned this from watching HashiCorp.
Mitchell Hashimoto made Terraform “wrong” in all the right ways. An external state file that users could edit? JSON instead of a proper database? CLI-only with no server? Every choice broke convention. But each one made Terraform feel right to the people using it. Not righteous, but usable.
That’s the lineage Soffi inherits.
The Handoff is Dead
Today’s product development is a game of telephone: Figma to Notion to Jira to GitHub to Slack. Design gets divorced from code. Specs go stale. Everyone comments. Few ship.
AI is collapsing these boundaries. PMs prototype with Claude. Designers submit PRs. Engineers care about pixels. The future isn’t better handoffs. It’s no handoffs.
Soffi gets this. It’s not another AI mockup generator. It’s the first true product workspace where teams design, build, and ship directly on live product surfaces. Your actual app becomes the canvas. Changes generate production-ready PRs. Metrics live next to mockups.
Why Cris, Why Now
Cris is exactly what I call a Motive Force founder. She ships v1 in weeks, not quarters. She closes customers from slide zero. She’s relentlessly resourceful and has that rare combination of taste and commercial ambition. Most importantly, she builds beautiful software because she takes deep pride in her craft. She’s building Soffi for herself.
She isn’t chasing today’s AI hype. She’s building for the world that’s coming, where “full-stack builders” become the norm and AI handles the heavy lifting. But she’s doing it the hard way: enterprise-ready from day one, with proper infrastructure and compliance built into the foundation, not bolted on later.
She’s already assembled a team of builders who’ve lived these problems at scale (GitHub, HashiCorp etc). People who know that the small stuff compounds. The kind who believe software should be beautiful all the way down, even in the parts no one sees.
The Next Chapter
Steve Jobs insisted the motherboard be beautiful. Dieter Rams said “less, but better.” This philosophy isn’t aesthetic. It’s strategic. Beauty compounds.
Soffi is building that future. One where product teams move at the speed of thought. Where the best idea wins, regardless of who can code. Where craft still matters, even when AI does the typing.
If you’re a PM sketching in notebooks, a designer fixing copy in GitHub, or an engineer who cares about pixels, this is for you.
Join the waitlist at soffi.ai
And if you’re building beautiful software that amplifies human intent, I’d love to hear from you.