John Maeda is one of the most thoughtful people I have met in my long career. After spending years at MIT, he took over the helm of Rhode Island School of Design, and help generations understand the symbiotic relationship between design and technology, and how it impacts humans. He was one of the first supporters of my design conference, Roadmap and over the years we have become good friends. Today, he announced that is leaving the esteemed venture capital partnership, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. And he will be joining Automattic, a company that offers WordPress as a cloud services and other related offerings.

Automattic is the brainchild of Matt Mullenweg, who was one of the founders of WordPress, an open source software that has grown to become such a large community that it now powers about 25 percent of the websites. Matt, also is one of my closest friends. It is great to see John and Matt team up — they are both cerebral and human centric leaders. I am excited to see what develops in the near future. (Photo courtesy of GigaOm)