I’m Yicheng, but most people call me YC.

For the last decade, I’ve been at IDEO, leading the healthcare practice across payers, health systems, pharma, medtech, and startups, and growing it to 20–30% of studio revenue. My work spans care delivery, digital health, and AI, often through complex B2B2C products where patients, providers, and payers are all users at once.

Again and again, I’ve stepped into complex, regulated environments, learned them quickly, and built teams that last. Highlights include California’s youth mental health platform and AI products and programs inside some of the world’s largest health organizations, with the right clinical oversight and escalation thresholds that determine when a person steps in. I’ve led zero-to-one builds, multi-year roadmaps, and the cross-functional work required to launch successfully. I do this as a player-coach, staying close to the work while growing junior talent into PMs and heads of product.

Earlier at IDEO, I founded the Digital Dream Lab, a creative-technology practice that grew to 50+ designers globally and helped seed the firm’s emerging-tech and AI work.

I’ve been a Stanford adjunct since 2020, teaching Design for Healthy Behaviors and founding Design for Extended Realities.

I hold an electrical engineering degree from Princeton University, where I developed a love of tinkering, building, and breathing healthy doses of solder. In my free time, I make ceramic sculpture and run absurdly long distances.