John Maeda is an American designer, engineer and creative leader.
An internationally recognized voice at the intersection of design and the technology industry,
Maeda works with early-, mid- and late-stage start-up CEOs as Design Partner at Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) in Silicon Valley. 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).
Maeda received his BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from
MIT, with his MS thesis entitled “Concurrent Sparse Matrix Equation Solver for Three-
dimensional Semiconductor Simulation.” He earned an MBA from Arizona State University and a
PhD from University of Tsukuba in Japan. He’s been awarded honorary doctorates in Fine Arts
from Maryland Institute College of Art and Simon Fraser University, and his other awards
include the White House’s National Design Award, the Blouin Foundation’s Creative Leadership
Award, the AIGA Medal, the Raymond Loewy Foundation Prize, the Mainichi Design Prize, the
Tokyo Type Director’s Club Prize, and induction into the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame.
A celebrated author and speaker, his books include The Laws of Simplicity, Creative Code, and
Redesigning Leadership, which expands on his Twitter feed @johnmaeda, one of TIME
Magazine’s 140 Best Twitter Feeds. Maeda’s talks on design, technology, and leadership for
TED.com have received cumulative views of over 2 million to date, and his live addresses to
audiences around the world from Davos to Beijing to São Paulo to NYC have been favorably
received. As a contemporary artist, Maeda’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in
Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, San Francisco, and NYC – and he continues to make art,
design, and write software codes.
John will be giving our closing keynote.
