John Maeda, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

John Maeda is an American executive spearheading a new convergence across the design and technology industries. He currently advises dozens of technology startups as a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a world-leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. In addition, Maeda serves on the Board of Sonos and Wieden+Kennedy, and on the Technical Advisory Board for Google’s ATAP.

Maeda draws on his diverse background as an MIT-trained engineer, award-winning designer, and organization executive to help leaders, inventors and designers push the boundaries of innovation in their fields. An internationally recognized speaker and author, Maeda’s books include The Laws of Simplicity, Creative Code, and Redesigning Leadership. He has appeared as a speaker all over the world, from Davos to Beijing to São Paulo to New York, and his talks for TED.com have received cumulative views of over 2 million to date.

At the start of 2015, Fast Company named KPCB one of the ten most innovative companies in design–a position fortified by Maeda’s subsequent launching of the “#DesignInTech Report” which covers venture capital funding and M&A activity for design in the technology industry (available free at http://kpcb.com/design).