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Enrique Allen, 500 Startups, @EnriqueAllen

Will the next Zuckerberg be a designer?

Enrique Allen is launching The Designer Fund to create a sustainable investment vehicle that challenges the best entrepreneurial designers in world to create businesses with meaningful impact. He was inspired to do this after being the founding designer at 500 Startups an early stage seed fund & accelerator in Silicon Valley. To date, he’s been a designer in residence with over 50 startups including previous portfolios with Facebook’s fbFund & Venrock. Enrique is a Bay Area Native who continues to teach at the Stanford d.school & contribute research with Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab. As a secret agent for world peace, Enrique meditates, makes public art & plays soccer.

Jon Bell, Windows Phone, @workjon

Make it Relevant

Jon Bell recently left frog design to work as an interaction designer on the Windows Phone design team. An art school graduate who wrote code for several years before returning to design, Jon is passionate about how technology and design, when blended well, can knock people's socks off. He jumps at any opportunity to share his vision of an industry where designers can prototype and developers are part of the design process.

Scott Berkun, Wordpress, @Berkun

Feedback without frustration: How to run a critique

Scott worked on Internet Explorer 1.0 to 5.0 (not 6) and is a team lead on WordPress.com. His work as a writer and speaker have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, Wired magazine, National Public Radio, CNBC and MSNBC. He is the author of three bestselling books: Making Things Happen, The Myths of Innovation and Confessions of a Public Speaker. His popular blog is at www.scottberkun.com.

Michelle Broderick, Uber, @MichelleBee

Michelle has been involved in online marketing ever since the Internet was plagued with marketing. Coincidence? Probably. Nevertheless, she has built a solid foundation in traditional marketing by working in-house, launching campaigns and calculating ROI at big ol' companies like Continental Airlines, Gap Inc, Yahoo, and RealNetworks. Then she built on that traditional foundation during her time at scrappy startups like Yelp and Redfin working as a marketing director and navigating the uncharted waters of social media marketing. Currently, she is consulting and advising promising startups on the art of marketing through community building efforts. It’s not easy, but it sure is fun.

Matt Brown, Facebook, @brownthings

Design By Content

Matt Brown is a Communication Designer at Facebook. Before moving to San Francisco, he ran design agency Things That Are Brown with his wife Tiffani. They designed, wrote and built websites for companies like Benchmark Capital, Microsoft, Harvest, PBA and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Christen Coomer, Valve

How I learned to stop worrying and love the engineers

Christen Coomer is a designer at Valve Corporation, an entertainment software and technology company in Bellevue, Washington. Christen designs user interfaces for Valve’s best-selling titles and Steam, a social entertainment platform with over 35 million active users. Before joining Valve in 2007, Christen served ten years at Microsoft, where she designed consumer products and platforms.

Hillel Cooperman, Jackson Fish Market, @hillel

Professional Software design. Don’t try this at home.

Hillel Cooperman is a co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, a small software startup focused on making beautiful software experiences. The latest product is A Story Before Bed – the first and only service that lets parents, grandparents, and children record video of themselves reading children’s books and play it as often as they like on the Mac, PC, or iPad. Before JFM, he was at Microsoft for almost 10 years where he ran the Windows User Experience team. When Hillel Cooperman isn't running his startup or seeking out the world's best food, he's investigating the secret underground world of Lego toys.

August de los Reyes, Artefact, @augustdlr

The Myth of Design Education

Designer, writer, and educator, August de los Reyes works for the strategic design firm Artefact. Previously with Microsoft, he led design teams for Windows and Microsoft Surface to further Natural User Interface. An affiliate design faculty member at the University of Washington, August is a graduate with distinction from Harvard, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Michelle Goldberg, Ignition Partners, @ellegold

Why VCs care about Design

Michelle Goldberg is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and emerging and future leaders in consumer and digital media software. She currently sits on 7 for profit and not for profit boards, including Glympse, Visible Technologies, SEOmoz, Ice.com. She previously sat on the board of TrackSimple, which was acquired in 2011 by BlueKai. In addition, she is an active fundraiser and advisor in education. Prior to joining Ignition, Michelle consulted to Microsoft’s Developer Division, worked as an investment banker in mergers and acquisitions at Olympic Capital Partners, and as a management consultant with A.T. Kearney and the China External Trade Development Council in Taiwan. She was named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Women in Technology by the Puget Sound Business Journal, and was a 2008 “40 under 40” Honoree.

Jay Greene, www.jaygreene.com, @iamjaygreene

Design is How it Works

Jay Greene, a senior writer for CNET and previously BusinessWeek’s Seattle bureau chief, has chronicled the rise and fall of corporations for more than two decades. One thing he’s learned along the way is that companies that don’t build lasting bonds with their customers are the ones mostly likely to become irrelevant. His book, Design Is How It Works, shows how some of the world’s smartest companies have used design to create more than just beautiful products. They’ve used great design to breed loyal customers who help propel those companies ahead of their competition.

Robby Ingebretsen, Pixel Lab, @ingebretsen

Developer Designer Workflow for Non-Zombies

Robby Ingebretsen is a user experience designer and developer with a singular purpose: making great ideas real. As the founder of Pixel Lab, a user experience consultancy that specializes in HTML5 and mobile technologies, he helps clients make cool stuff–the kind that needs the unique blend of a little design love and a little engineering kung-fu.

Kristine Johnson, Cognition Studio, @cognitionstudio

Visualizing Healthcare

Kristine is the co-founder and director of design at Cognition Studio, a Seattle firm focused on providing the biomedical community with accurate visual communications. The complex considerations inherent in working with scientifically inclined clients allows her to wield design as a science; and consult on best practices for design to create comprehension for their target audience. She studied Biomedical Visualization at the University of Illinois—Chicago Medical Campus. Working for a wide variety of clients that include Children's, Gilead, Fred Hutch, Stanford, Swedish, UW Medicine, and VentiRx.

Jake Knapp, Google, @jakek

CEOs: How to lead the way to great design. (with Braden)

Jake Knapp has worked at Google for four years as a designer and user experience manager, and currently leads a UX Tiger Team running design sprints throughout the company. While working for Google, Jake has lived in Seattle, Switzerland, and now San Francisco and has worked on projects such as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Voice, and Google+. Before coming to Google, Jake grew up on Orcas Island, Washington, went to the UW, and worked at Oakley and Microsoft. He is currently among the world’s tallest interaction designers.

Braden Kowitz, Google Ventures, @kowitz

CEOs: How to lead the way to great design. (with Jake)

Braden is passionate about creating great user experiences on the Web. He's equal parts interaction designer, storyteller, guerilla researcher, consensus builder, and scrappy prototyper. Over the past four years Braden has been focused on helping Google teams design and launch the first version of their product. He has led design for Google Buzz, Gmail, Google Apps for Business, Google Spreadsheets, OpenSocial, and Google Trends. Before joining Google, Braden spent his college years building virtual reality simulators at the Beckman Institute, and interactive visualizations at Lucent Technologies. He studied Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon.

Kevin Moore, PixelLab, @kevmoo

The Art of Engineering

Kevin has worn many hats. Program manager. Project manager. People manager. Evangelist. Software engineer. He started programming at 9 and was building web software professionally at 15. Kevin spent 6 years at Microsoft working on Microsoft Windows and Windows Presentation Foundation as a Program Manager. He became a recognized expert in component design and implementation for user interfaces. Kevin now provides software consulting and freelancing services targeting Open Source web technologies.

Kim Obbink, Filter

Tribal Instincts

Kim is the Executive Creative Director and VP of Digital Services at Filter, the West Coast's leading digital solutions agency. As a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Kim started her career as a graphic designer at Microsoft in 1989 and has been leading creative teams ever since. Both as CEO / Founder of the award winning interactive agency Tattoo Media, and in her current role at Filter, Kim is passionate about creativity, the creative process, and creative people.

Andrew Otwell, Amazon, @heyotwell

Five Deadly Venoms. Punch! Kick! Hire!

Andrew is the Design Manager for the Core Shopping Customer Experience at Amazon.com, where he's worked for more than five years as both senior designer and design manager. Before joining Amazon he spent ten years in Austin, TX and Berlin, Germany as a designer working for startups and agencies. He lives in West Seattle with his wife and 2 year old daughter.

Kelly Smith, Curious Office, @curiousoffice

Mobile Design: The Next Wave of Opportunity

Kelly is an active entrepreneur who incubates and invests in early stage companies through Curious Office. Most recently, he is the founder of Zapd, Apple's pick for App of the Week for delivering on the promise of "a website in 60 seconds from your iPhone". Prior to Zapd, Kelly founded Inkd.com, and was also co-founder of Imagekind which was the first and largest user-generated marketplace for buying and selling art prints. Imagekind was sold to CafePress in 2008. In the late '90s Kelly was co-founder of an early online video content initiative called RocketVox which was acquired by thePlatform (a Comcast company). Kelly takes an active interest in product design and development and is a painter in his spare time.

Tyesha Snow, Experience Designer, @tyeshasnow

Contract vs. In-House

Tyesha Snow is a Strategic Experience Designer who's been heads-down in research and analysis, thinking and designing, testing and planning, collaborating and innovating for over 12 years. Her time is shared between contracting as a user experience designer, developing new digital products and creative consulting. Currently, Tyesha is designing educational iPad apps with Exprima Media, leading product design at Picture of Health, working as a creative consultant at tenfour agency, and developing two productivity tool startups. She's very active in Portland's design community including ADX, AIGA Portland, Designspeaks and #thinkndrink.

Jeff Weir, Microsoft

Prototyping is Power

Combining design, code, and a computer science background, Jeff creates interactive experiences ranging from conservative to fantastical. In his sixth year as a UX designer at Microsoft, Jeff currently works on the next version of Windows. Prior Microsoft efforts include Live Labs Pivot, SkyDrive, and Microsoft Codename Max. His award winning personal side projects keep him busy when he’s not riding his bike.