product and AI ventures executive | leading health & tech @ideo | teaching design @stanford
YC is a Senior Portfolio Director at IDEO, leading a multi-million dollar portfolio in healthcare and wellbeing. With a personal specialty in digital health and emerging tech, he uses human-centered design to bring ventures from ideation to market.
He advises executive leaders to define realistic product strategy, navigate the creative process, and enable the right conditions for digital transformation. Embracing the mindset of a player-coach, YC also shares his expertise as a sought-after conference speaker, workshop facilitator, startup advisory board member, and graduate-level lecturer.
Some of YC’s market-facing impacts include designing the future of clinical trials experience for underserved populations, improving neurological disease treatment and prevention, and making personal wellbeing engaging through digital interventions in sleep, mental health, and movement.
As a creative technologist, YC brings his background in design and development to discover new use cases for emerging technologies, building future-facing provocations of how we relate to each other through multi-sensory spatial experiences, XR/VR/AR, and generative AI.
YC is a long-time lecturer at the Stanford Design School. He teaches "Design for Healthy Behaviors,” a graduate-level course where students apply design thinking alongside patient-volunteers with chronic conditions to improve their long term health. He also teaches "Design for Extended Realities," where students explore and experiment with state-of-the-art technologies like VR, AR, XR, and the metaverse in a critical, intentional, and human-centered way.