Renewal Accelerator Cohort
Cultural Renewal Project Profiles
Introducing Our Cohort Pilot Leader
DAVE EVANS
Co-Founder, Stanford Life Design Lab
Co-Author, Designing Your Life
Dave started his fourth career teaching “how to apply the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life” in the Stanford Design Program in 2007. His first career was a failed attempt to solve the energy crisis in the late 70’s — a drastically premature venture. Dave’s second sojourn was 15 years of company leadership roles in Silicon Valley, like heading up the first mouse and laser printer projects at Apple and co-founding digital entertainment giant Electronic Arts. In 1990, Dave changed clothes again to become a freelance management consultant, primarily working with high-tech founders and start-up teams addressing the challenges of explosive growth and change.
Since college, Dave has had an abiding, faith-nourished commitment to living and helping others live a coherent life – thoroughly integrating soul and role. Beginning as a college sophomore struggling with what to major in, Dave’s been doggedly pursuing how to discern God’s leading in vocation and how to follow that leading. For four decades, Dave has been teaching on the integration of faith and work in churches, colleges, camps, and conferences.
Dave delivered the keynote on “God’s Design for Work” at Yale’s inaugural Believers in Business conference 2011 and taught on “Spiritual Innovation” at the 2014 national conference of Redeemer Church’s Center for Faith & Work in New York, where he also served as CFW’s first ever Entrepreneur-in-Residence in the Spring of 2016 and again in 2017. Dave serves as a strategic advisor to Fuller Seminary on Vocation and Formation, to the Veritas Forum where he facilitated the prototype Veritas Salon, and is a Venture Partner with Praxis Labs nurturing Redemptive Entrepreneurs. Dave’s been contributing as a national thought leader on faith and work since the 80’s when he served as a dean, teacher and mentor of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s Marketplace Ministry conferences.
Dave is a lecturer in the Stanford Design Program, co-founder of the Life Design Lab, and co-author with Bill Burnett of the NYT Bestseller Designing Your Life (2016), and Designing Your Work Life (2020). He holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and a graduate diploma in Contemplative Practice and Spiritual Direction from San Francisco Theological Seminary.
Dave lives with his two adorable dogs, Chico and Daisy, on the coast in Santa Cruz, CA where he enjoys sailing the Monterey Bay and cycling the redwood forests.