Bill Burnett

Bill Burnett is the Executive Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford and an Adjunct Professor in Mechanical Engineering - Design at Stanford. He is also the Founder and Managing Director of the Designing Your Life Institute in Singapore. Bill is a popular public speaker whose TEDx Stanford talk has over 8 million views, and he is a three-time entrepreneur.

Bill received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering - Product Design at Stanford and has worked in industry and academia ever since. He teaches in the undergraduate and graduate program in Design as well as classes at the d.school, Stanford’s innovation Institute.  In addition, he has worked in startups and Fortune 100 companies, including seven years at Apple designing award-winning notebook computers and several years in the toy industry designing Star Wars toys.  He advises several startup technology companies started by his students. He is the co-founder and Managing Director of the Designing Your Life Institute, an educational non-profit that promotes life design skills in Singapore and across Southeast Asia.

Bill is also the co-author of Designing Your Life, a New York Times #1 bestseller that captures the lessons from 16 years of teaching the Stanford class of the same name. In 2020 he co-authored Designing Your New Work Life—the second edition published to address work after the global COVID pandemic—a book that helps you reimagine your life and your job. Both books are based on design thinking and positive psychology, and attempt to help people answer the age-old question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”

Bill lives in the San Francisco neighborhood called the Dogpatch with his wife and two elderly cats.  His three children and two grandchildren are his enduring joy.  He continues to teach at Stanford and he gets in the studio whenever he can to paint – the place where he finds flow everywhere.  He is inspired by the Robert Henri quote; “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state that makes art inevitable.”