I'm chatting with a couple of teams and every time get thought that most of startups don't need a designer. Commodification of design practices bring possibility to build a good UX friendly products by anyone
Most early stage startups need do-ers. Ive been in a lot of early early stage cos (pre-seed etc) & every one of them needed a designer. However, they need someone who can do things aka ship things & get shit done. A little different from those designers who can psd things etc