 The Cube presents On the Ground. Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with The Cube, and we are on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley with the Association for Corporate Grother, ACG. Tonight, ACG is doing their 12th Annual Grow Awards, and we're fortunate right now to be joined by two special guests. We've got Dan Harden, Dan is the CEO of Whipsaw. Dan, welcome to The Cube. Thank you, it's a pleasure being here. Sorry. And we've also got Nikki Boyd, Nikki is the CEO of Versa, I mean, Nikki, welcome to The Cube. Thank you. So a couple questions for both of you. Dan, first of all, we know that you are a well revered product designer. You have worked on products and experiences for Google and GE and Cisco. You're quite an award winner yourself. Talk to us about some of the trends that you're seeing in product design in 2016. Oh, well, let's see, there are quite a few. So, you know, I think the first is we are seeing design become so ubiquitous. Every company needs design. Consumers are getting very, very picky so they can choose. They are only buying good design. So in a lot of ways, bad design is becoming extinct. The other is I'm seeing a kind of a change in the definition of design. Design has gone from kind of an object-based noun vocation to more of an experience verb. It's like a, it's a process. So we sometimes call it design thinking, but we use processes that design processes that enable companies to really think about their businesses in completely different ways. So I find that very exciting, of course. So it's more like a performance art now design and everybody has their own opinion about what it is. So it's kind of become polymorphic in many ways. It's changing and it's growing, expanding. Excellent, speaking of growth and expansion, Dan, you have won many awards in your time. How have you been able to grow and sustain that growth at such a rapid pace and monetize it as a designer? Well, traditional definitions of growth for companies means revenue growth or a head count, but in creative agencies like my own, if you grow too fast, if you have too many people, it often means that your quality will suffer. We need to stay vibrant and real and very focused. So we don't need to grow much. I like to equate our success and our growth to how our companies that we work for, our clients, how they are growing by taking our design and growing out of the field, a lot like what's gonna happen with Nicky's company. So it's kind of a new definition of growth. I also like to see our company, the clients that we design for when they ship a product, it's out in the market. I like seeing the kind of growth in the product volume shipment because that means that our design values are being expressed on a global scale. And that's where I think I'm most proud of our growth, is seeing our designs out there influencing lives in positive ways. Excellent. So speaking of influencing design in positive ways, WipStock tonight is sponsoring the coolest product raffle and one of the featured products is the Sterling from Bursamee. Nicky, you met your colleagues at Bursamee at Stanford and you had this idea that we're gonna change early education or the education system. Talk to us about that idea and what you're doing with the Sterling to make that change. Absolutely, so education transformed my life. I came from a single parent family and my mom always prioritized education. So that value had stayed with me and although the early part of my career was something totally different, I came to Stanford with a view to rethinking about my personal mission in life and I knew I wanted to do something in and around education. My two co-founders, they're actually brothers. They'd also had similar backgrounds although clearly not of the same family as my own, lived some life of service by serving in the military and we came together with an idea that we wanted to do something to impact the education system at scale and help other children, other young children have the same growth experience that we had had. So we started spending, we spent a year together at Stanford researching in and around education for ideas and we came to a few different viewpoints, one of which was the earlier you intervene, the greater the impact you can have on someone's life and so we've become champions of this idea that education starts at birth, not as traditionally thought, the day a child enters school and there's this research which is really the key inspiration for the Sterling which is that 80% of brain development happens in the first four years of life and the number of words that a child hears during that period of time is the most important thing for that brain development. So in a time of quantified self, the Fitbit, the Jawbone and all the rest, we decided we would build a word measuring equivalent for babies. So the Sterling is a device which is worn by a baby and it measures the quantity of words they're hearing and gives feedback to parents to try and encourage them to do more or reassure them that they're doing enough. Outstanding. Talk to us about how you're collaborating and partnering with Website to build this wearable product to Sterling. Absolutely. So as Dan mentioned, design thinking has become really pervasive across companies and we knew that good design, good function, being able to get involved with the parents and child's life in a frictionless way was really important and we searched long and hard actually to find someone who was sympathetic to that and Dan has children of his own, they're older now, he's designed many kid and baby products before and when we met for the first time, there was just a click in understanding that I felt from him and so we engaged Whipsaw to work on the design of the product and yeah, they did a great job. Excellent. And one question more for you Dan. I know you mentioned a number of different companies that you work with. Can you give us any insight in addition to versing me what some of the companies are in the valley that you're working with on product design? Yeah, well being a consultant, I'm not allowed to talk about ongoing things but we have about 70 projects in the office at any given time, ranging from consumer electronics to business equipment, scientific goods. There's really nothing we're not designing right now. It's pretty astounding. I'm really excited about any company, any industry that approaches us to have us think about things that are really on the cutting edge. That's what excites me, like the versing me starling. And an example of that would be, we're designing five different robots right now for five different companies. This is cutting edge. You know, the big future that I thought was gonna happen decades ago where robots are running around in our world, it's finally here and we are able to now design these better robots that will finally make them very friendly. We're also excited about all these different wearable, medical, personal healthcare-type products we're doing. You're gonna see a lot of that from us. The mobility space, automobiles, bicycles, moving around our world is also hot right now. That industry is experiencing a little bit of a mini renaissance. And then generally, we just love giving personality to technology. We like to warm it up. We like to give it a sense of soul so that you connect with that first than the technology. So we put technology, kind of stuff it in the back seat, so that we let the experience drive the design. And that's how you get products like the Sterling. Excellent. I love that, having the experience drive the design. Den Harden, CEO of Whipsaw. Thank you so much for being on theCUBE. You're welcome. And Nikki Boyd, CEO of VersaMe. Thank you for being on theCUBE as well. Thank you very much. And with that said, thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm your host Lisa Martin and we'll see you next time.