Tristan Harris is a former design ethicist at Google who left the company to create Time Well Spent, a nonprofit movement that reveals how technology undermines discourse and behavior through its ad-driven mission of capturing and then holding users' attention. Time Well Spent seeks to demonstrate incentives and design practices that create more meaningful interactions with technology.
Harris has been called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” by The Atlantic magazine. His work has been featured on 60 Minutes and The PBS NewsHour, as well as The Economist, Wired, the New York Times, and more.
Prior to joining Google, Harris served as chief executive officer of Apture, a startup that provided enhanced search capabilities to publishers. Google acquired Apture in 2011. He holds several patents from his work at Apple, Wikia, Apture, and Google.
Harris graduated from Stanford University with a degree in computer science. In 2009, he was rated #16 in Inc Magazine’s Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30.