Emma van Niekerk

I love design because it's about understanding people, and people are interesting. For the past 16 years I've made it my work to understand people's needs and design products that serve them. I started in South Africa, then made my way to San Francisco via Pittsburgh and Seattle, studying at Carnegie Mellon University and working at Microsoft and Cooper on the way. I dabbled in entrepreneurship by co-founding Urbantag in 2011. 18 months later we were acquired by Tagged.com. Then, after a 2 year hiatus to ride a motorcycle through the Americas, I started working with the fantastic people at Intercom.com as a Product Design Director.