Georg Petschnigg is an executive, entrepreneur, and product leader. He feels most comfortable at the intersection of design, technology, and business.
Throughout his career he created products that changed how people work, create, and understand the world. He believes that technology needs to serve the human need to create.
He currently serves as Chief Design Officer at Nextdoor, creating products that enrich the lives of neighbors everywhere.
Previously he was the SVP of Product Design at The New York Times, focused on products and journalism experiences that help people understand and engage with the world. This spanned their entire product portfolio – from News, to an Apple Design Award-winning Games app, a modern publishing platform, to premium ad formats, innovations in Cooking, Audio, Wirecutter, community, subscription growth and many more. This resulted in the most consequential redesign of The New York Times app.
As WeTransfer’s Chief Innovation Officer and General Manager in the Americas, he was part of creating the WeTransfer Pro subscription service for creatives to help gather, shape, and share their ideas.
Georg co-founded FiftyThree in 2011 and served as CEO until WeTransfer’s acquisition in 2018. FiftyThree are the makers of Paper®, the celebrated sketching app for getting ideas down, Paste® the fastest way for teams to share and gather around their ideas, and Pencil, the award-winning digital stylus. Internationally recognized for design excellence and innovation, they’ve received awards from Apple, IDSA, Communication Arts, and IxDA. FiftyThree’s products reach more than 30 Million creative thinkers worldwide and defined mobile creativity.
At Microsoft he co-founded the Pioneer Studios, a design venture fund, where he led the incubation of Microsoft Courier the foldable tablet and other mobile products. He was part of the first online version of Office, and developed the new graphic system in PowerPoint, Word, Excel.
He worked at the Stanford Computer Graphics Lab, Bell Laboratories, the T.J. Watson Research Center, as well as Microsoft Research in the areas of video, image, and light-field processing and published seminal research in computational photography.
Georg advises and invests in businesses at the intersection of design, technology, and science (CTRL-Labs acquired by Facebook, Sensel, LiquidText).
Throughout his career he has consulted and advised on brand, design, product strategy, and organizational design.
Georg has advocated for multi-disciplinary education in design and engineering, which he has taught at Stanford, New York University, and the University of Washington.
He holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering and Economics from Columbia, and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Product Design from Stanford.