Name: Daniel Burka
Location: London, England
Current Role: Director of Design at Resolve to Save Lives
Associated with: Google Ventures, Simple, Vital Strategies, Milk Inc., Digg
I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Daniel for a few years now. I first met him in Mumbai about four years ago through an intro from our mutual friend – Rahul Chakraborty. My first memories of learning about Daniel were through an episode of High Resolution. I was inspired by his holistic thinking about the design function and his early work at Google Ventures.
As I’ve gotten to know Daniel a little more than the public design figure, I’ve learned that he’s an even nicer & kinder human. Maybe it’s true what they say about Canadians – that they’re all nice humans 🙂
I interviewed Daniel for this series in 2019 but didn’t publish the interview until now because I wanted to move this Conversations series to the Product Disrupt Blog. But life got in between and I never finished the blog redesign project. So I decided to publish it here after all – this gold needs to exist on the internet. So here we go…
Who is Daniel Burka?
Hi! I’m writing from Istanbul airport, on my way from Addis Ababa to Dhaka. These days, I’m working on an ultra-thin electronic medical record called Simple, that’s deployed in India and soon in Bangladesh and Ethiopia.
I’ve been a product designer for a long time, having helped start a design agency in the late 1990s, worked in Silicon Valley for a while at Digg and Slack, and was an entrepreneur whose last company was purchased by Google. I became a design partner at Google Ventures for 5 years before leaving to join the not-for-profit Resolve to Save Lives, where I work on Simple.
What drove you to design in the first place?
I kinda lucked into design. My twin brother and I were looking for summer jobs in Canada and didn’t see anything great. So, we started a little web design business with some friends.
This was in the early days of web design and it felt like everyone was just learning from each other and hacking designs together to see what worked. I immediately fell in love with the power of design to help people accomplish their goals.
If I’m not wrong, you’re the one who gave the internet the ‘like’ button while at Digg. Mind sharing the story behind it?
I’m not sure I can take all the credit but the thumbs-up “Digg” vote button was pretty cool. This was back when AJAX was brand new and Kevin Rose had the foresight to see that voting buttons could work well within a website and could be distributed on news sites as well using iFrames.
In just a few days, we designed a vote button that could be put anywhere on the web. Before too long, others copied that pattern and there were “like” buttons all over the place.
Often, an idea like the “like” button doesn’t come from some deep philosophy or study, but from using a newly available technology to do something clever in the moment that wasn’t possible before.
What was your favorite part about working at Google Ventures? Do you miss it?
Google Ventures was an incredible place to work. In a single week, I got to consult with a huge range of companies tackling anything from enterprise networking, to indoor farming, retailing, medical wearables, etc. The variety of brilliant entrepreneurs that we got to work with was vast. And, there’s a lot you can do with billions of dollars behind you. I also got to work with Jake, Braden, Zeratsky, Kristen, Kate, Vanessa, and Michael who were all brilliant and who I learned a lot from.
I miss GV a bit… it’s a challenging role but not super stressful. But I am really happy doing something that is almost 100% geared towards meaningful improvement of the world in my current role.
What do you think about the tech culture in the Silicon Valley?
That’s a big question! There are many wonderful things about the Bay Area. People are wildly ambitious and many people are truly empathetic wonderful humans who want to leverage tech for good.
I’ve collaborated with lots of hacker-minded people who want to build products and are great. But there are downsides too — anywhere with so much money sloshing around creates things that optimize for wealth instead of bettering the world. And, too often it feels like Silicon Valley has challenges tackling the problems right on the doorstep, such as diversity and fair pay or the homelessness problems in SF.
You moved away from Google Ventures to make healthcare products for developing economies. What inspired the move?
Google Ventures was a reasonably meaningful job — we invested a large percentage of the fund into life sciences companies that were doing amazing medical advancements, like Flatiron Health or Foundation Medicine.
But, after success in the Bay Area, I thought a lot about applying almost all of my time to meaningful work. When I met Dr Tom Frieden, he told me that Resolve to Save Lives’ goal was to save 100 million lives from cardiovascular disease… well, he didn’t need to twist my arm very hard.
What do you think of the next wave of designers?
I’m super excited for the next generation of designers. In many ways, the product design world is much more complex than it was when I was starting out. And I’m constantly impressed by how sophisticated young designers are.
I often see them being more thoughtful than designers back in the early 2000s and that’s definitely a good thing — the run-and-gun approach to design brought a lot of problems.
Do you find any major differences between how the work is done in the West as compared to India?
I think there is more in common than there are differences. The designers I hang out with in Bangalore and Mumbai have really similar processes to designers in the US.
It is noticeable that engineering has an outsize influence on product teams in India, but the US was similar even just ten years ago. I’m really excited to see where India takes the design world.
Your thoughts on open-sourcing design and the way we could go about it?
Considering it’s 2019, I’m kind of astonished at how stunted design is in the open-source world. And, to be honest, I don’t have a lot of answers. At the very least I hope that more non-consumer software designers put their work out on the web so we can openly build on each other’s patterns. Our team is trying to do this with Simple.
How can a designer overcome self-doubt and imposter syndrome?
It helps a lot just to know that everyone else feels like an imposter sometimes. I’ve been designing for over twenty years and have been by most measures very successful, but you throw me into designing an electronic medical record for clinical environments in India and I wake up in a cold sweat some nights wondering, “Do I know what am I doing!?”
Keep in mind that all of the ‘confident’ people you see out there are usually just as scared as you are — they just might be better at hiding it.
What are you working on these days? Mind giving us a little sneak peek?
All of my time is spent designing Simple – the ultra-thin EMR for managing patients with hypertension. You can read all about it at Simple.org and it’s all open-source, which means we share our designs, code, and thought process online as much as we can.
As I recently wrote on our blog, the software is currently being used in almost 400 hospitals in India to manage over 120,000 patients with hypertension.
And lastly, what would be your advice to the young designers?
Stay curious, stay humble. Focus on the work and the wonderful humans you can help with well-designed products, not the accolades.
– Daniel Burka
Rapid Fire Round
Your best memory of growing up in Canada?
My fondest memory is cooking pots of blue mussels on the beach with my family.
Favorite leisure time activities?
Rock climbing, tho I’m not very good.
The key attributes you look for in a potential hire?
Curiosity and attention to detail.
Designers or Makers you love hanging out with?
Vanessa Cho, Kevin Rose, Akshay Verma, Anish Acharya, May-li Koh, Tom Watson, Mia Blume, Amélie Lamont, Stacy La, Coulton Bunney, JT White, Mackey Saturday… too many to name and I don’t get to spend enough time with them.
Favourite travel destinations?
Lima, Bangkok, Paris, Tokyo, the mountains of Patagonia… all places I could easily live.
If Daniel wasn’t a designer, he would probably be______.
A historian or mountain guide.
The next big thing in design could be ______.
Solving global health challenges.
You get inspired when ______.
People work on gnarly long-term problems like the environment, good governance, education, health, etc.
If you found a time machine, would you travel to the past or the future? And why?
Distant past, to see what the wild places of the world looked like before humans had a chance to decimate it.
Darshan is _______.
Darshan. A human like no other human.
Thank you Daniel for sharing your experience with us and for the patience you showed while I took the ungodly amount of time to publish this interview.
Learn more about Daniel on his personal website and follow him on X [Twitter] to stay up to date with him.
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