Yves Behar, an industrial designer from Switzerland, came to Silicon Valley during a time of immense technological innovation and had a front row seat at the subsequent dotcom bubble. Over the past decade, his design studio fuseproject has produced a remarkable track record of products and brands as diverse as the Herman Miller SAYL task chair, the XO laptop for One Laptop per Child, Jawbone and its line of headsets and Jambox, and recently Ouya and its video game console. Fuseproject has also pioneered a unique approach to working with startups through a design venture business model.

Christina Brodbeck came to Silicon Valley determined to make her way in tech. With a master’s degree in instructional technologies and multimedia design, she worked her way up from a job at a bookstore to become a founding team member at YouTube. She was their first UI designer, responsible for the majority of the site’s early design, and then led YouTube’s mobile design. She has since co-founded theicebreak, an app and website that helps couples enjoy and make the most of their relationship.

After growing up in India and earning a PhD in psychology, Rashmi Sinha went to UC Berkeley for a postdoc where she switched her focus to human-computer interaction. She then left academia to start her own user-experience consultancy and developed MindCanvas, a game-like tool for user research. Simultaneously, Rashmi and her husband built SlideShare, a site for people to share presentations online, in just six months. Since its launch in 2006, more than 9 million presentations have been uploaded to SlideShare, helping professionals connect through content. LinkedIn acquired SlideShare for over $100 million in 2012.