Daniel Burka
Product manager and designer who focuses on solving complex global health problems in simple ways.
I am the co-founder of Hard Problems, a nonprofit with the goal of helping more designers work on meaningful problems like climate change, public health and good government.
On the side, I’m an angel investor and sit on the board of the India-based health tech startup Loop Health. I volunteer as an advisor to the U.K. genomics project Our Future Health and with Médecins Sans Frontières on its technology initiatives.
I spent eight years as the director of product and design at a global public health nonprofit called Resolve to Save Lives, where I led the open-source project, Simple. Simple is used by thousands of hospitals in India, Bangladesh and Ethiopia to manage over 6 million patients with hypertension and diabetes.
Story
1990s I grew up on Prince Edward Island in Canada. My older brother Peter was a nerd and my mother was very supportive, so I was lucky enough to have a computer at home as a teenager and started hacking on projects. In school, I even won a prize in a Remembrance Day website contest run by Veterans Affairs Canada — my own legit copy of CorelDRAW!
1996 When I was 16, my twin brother Nicholas and I started a web design agency called Whitelands Studio with our high school friends to save money for university. We got paid to digitize the collections of local museums, such as the Canadian Potato Museum in O’Leary and the Fisheries Museum in Basin Head.
1999 That company became silverorange. We learned the ropes and worked on notable projects like the Firefox brand and the Mozilla website. I’m increasingly proud that silverorange is still going strong more than 25 years later, changing the world for the better one project at a time.
2005 I was lured to Silicon Valley by Kevin Rose to be the creative director of the news pioneer Digg. For five years, we broke new ground in how news was shared online. Kevin, Leah Culver and I also co-founded the social network Pownce, which we sold to Six Apart.
2010 I left at the zenith of Digg, and Stewart Butterfield brought me on as director of design for the game Glitch. God bless Stewart and the team ... I left after a year because I wasn’t satisfied with game design, and they went on to turn Glitch into the rocket ship Slack. Slack was a game? Yep, it doesn’t make sense to anyone else either.
2011 Kevin Rose and I then started an incubator company called Milk, which we sold to Google a year later. I spent the next five years as a design partner at Google Ventures, where I got to work with a huge variety of companies such as Flatiron Health, Zipline, Farmers Business Network, Blue Bottle Coffee and many others. I also had the chance to contribute to the book Sprint with my colleagues Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz and Michael Margolis.
2016 I met the founding team of the nonprofit Laboratoria while visiting Lima, Peru, in 2015. I joined its board in 2016 and served six years, until 2022.
2018 I was introduced to former CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden and soon joined him at Resolve to Save Lives to build a technology team supporting large-scale hypertension control programs. We started the Simple open-source project and piloted it in Punjab, India, in 2019. Simple quickly grew into an international effort in thousands of hospitals and clinics.
2020 Along with my ongoing work at Resolve to Save Lives, I volunteered with Project N95 to help get personal protective equipment (PPE) to health care workers who needed it most during the COVID-19 pandemic.
2021 On the side, I started the Health icons project, where a big group of wonderful volunteers has created hundreds of icons as a public good for health projects anywhere in the world. I also joined the board of Loop Health, a fantastic India-based startup in which I invested.
2024 In late 2024, Mahima Chandak, my partner Elyce Cole and I started Hard Problems, a nonprofit with the goal of helping more technologists work on the world’s hardest problems, like climate change and public health. We opened an office in London at the end of the year.
2025 After eight years, I stepped down from my role at Resolve to Save Lives, where I had led the Simple open-source project, which still supports large-scale public health programs in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia. Simple is used by thousands of clinicians to longitudinally manage more than 6 million patients with hypertension and diabetes.
2026 Today, I am focused on
Hard Problems, the nonprofit
I co-founded to help designers work full time on meaningful
problems like public health, education and climate change.
I am also an angel investor and sit on the board of the India-based
health tech startup
Loop Health. I volunteer as an
advisor to the U.K. genomics project
Our Future Health and
with Médecins Sans Frontières on
its technology initiatives.
Contact
I try to respond to as many emails as I can: contact@danielburka.com
Other places
You can also find me on:
Sites and apps I worked on
Things I wrote
Use a spreadsheet to choose your next role
Digital health tools are too slow and too hard to use
Case study: Keep it simple
Lessons from an ultra-thin EMR
Everyone is a designer, get over it
A designer’s guide to “Bike Shedding”
The best ‘Design’ books not about design
Interview
My conversation with High Resolution gives a good perspective on how I think about design.
Factfulness
Winners Take All
How Buildings Learn
The Death & Life of Great American Cities
Let My People Go Surfing
Creativity, Inc.