Willem Van Lancker is an American entrepreneur and product designer, who is best known for being the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of ebooks company Oyster.[1][2][3] He is currently the Head of Incubations at Thrive Capital, a technology investment firm based in New York City.[4]
Biography
Willem Van Lancker was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended the private high school Moses Brown School, where he was named the 2016 Outstanding Young Alumnus.[5][6] Van Lancker received a BFA degree in Graphic Design in 2011 from Rhode Island School of Design.[7] He briefly attended Harvard Business School for graduate courses but did not complete his degree.[8] It was at Harvard Business School where he met Eric Stromberg, one of the future co-founders of Oyster.[8]
He began his career at Adidas in 2008 as an intern.[1] Van Lancker later interned at Apple in 2009 where he helped create Apple's emoji.[9] From 2010 until 2012, Van Lancker was a user experience designer for Google Maps where he worked on Google Maps for iOS and "The New Google Maps."[10][8][11] Oyster was founded in 2012 by Van Lancker, Eric Stromberg and Andrew Brown.[2] After Oyster was acquired by Google in 2015, Van Lancker and the rest of the staff moved to Google.[12]
On April 6, 2022, Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee announced that Rhode Island's new license plate was designed by Van Lancker after the state held an open call for entries for a new design. The design features 5 waves.[14]
