Jake Knapp Speaker Biography
Design Partner at Google Ventures and
Best-Selling Author of Sprint
Business Speaker Jake Knapp is a talented designer and co-author of the New York Times best selling book, Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Jake Knapp is currently a Design Partner at GV (Google Ventures), the venture capital arm of Alphabet Inc., where he created the GV “sprint” process—a method of taking an abstract idea to a testable phase in just five days.
Sprint
In his talks, Jake discusses how to simplify life and work to do what really matters as well as how to take ideas and turn them into big hit products in just five days through his concept of running “sprints”. Through Jake’s process he streamlines the development process of new concepts and turns these ideas to functioning well-tested products remarkably quickly. He has lectured about the sprint method at Stanford and Columbia University.
Startups
Jake has run sprints for over a hundred different startups including but not limited to Nest, Slack and Foundation Medicine. Before joining GV, Jake was a designer for Microsoft and Google. While at Google, Jake led sprints for many large projects including Gmail, Hangouts and Google X.
Media
An accomplished writer, Jake’s writing on startups and productivity has been featured in Fast Company, TechCrunch, and Life Hacker.
Jake is currently among the world’s tallest designers. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons.
Jake Knapp Speaking Topics
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 days
Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? To answer these questions, Jake Knapp created the design sprint. It’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, and more—proven at more than 100 startups and at companies like Google and Airbnb, and adapted into a step-by-step process that any team can use. Through stories and hard-won lessons, Jake will explain how to get the best ideas from every person on your team, make great decisions without groupthink, validate ideas before wasting time, and set the course for a successful business.
Defragmentation: Simplifying Work and Life to Do What Matters
At work, our time is often fragmented by email, meetings, and urgent but ultimately unimportant tasks. At home, our attention is divided between our smartphones, our friends and family, and our long term projects. We take this perpetual distraction for granted—but there’s no reason why we have to work and live this way. In this talk, Jake shows how simple actions can shift the way teams work together for radical efficiency improvements, and how this same approach can be applied to our personal lives.
Jake Knapp Books
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Purchase BookJake Knapp Videos
Jake Knapp Speaker Testimonials
"Jake inspired an audience of 300 medical executives to rethink their approach to care transformation. He made the principles of rapid design accessible with engaging case-studies from his work across multiple industries. It's rare to leave a presentation with a new approach to your work that can be rapidly applied."
- | Ralph Pascualy, Chief Executive of Swedish Medical Group, Seattle
"Jake’s presentations are always superbly received at Columbia University. He shows a genuine passion for teaching, mixing surprising insights with great storytelling."
- | R.A. Farrokhnia, Professor at Columbia Schools of Engineering & Business
"Jake wowed us with his talk. His combination of first-hand experience, deep knowledge and engaging humor is incredibly rare and incredibly entertaining."
- | Nir Eyal, Organizer of The Habit Summit
