I’m a full-time venture capitalist, running a fund called Resilience Reserve in partnership with Chris Anderson, who is best known for his long stewardship of TED. We back companies that we believe will make the world more resilient in some important way, and I’m extremely proud of this work and our portfolio.
I was born in New York, grew up in Connecticut, went to public schools, then moved to California to attend Stanford. There I studied Arabic and modern Middle Eastern history. After graduating I was a Fulbright Scholar in Cairo before becoming a yuppie at Bain. I then landed at Harvard Business School by way of Warsaw (of course).
I’ve been involved in technology ever since. I worked at Silicon Graphics at its apogee, and then as a junior VC, before becoming the solo founder of Listen.com, which built the Rhapsody music service.
Rhapsody was “the first Spotify” in every meaningful sense of the phrase. We pioneered the unlimited on-demand streaming model that everyone else later adopted. We were also the first online company to sign full-catalog licenses with all the major music labels. I eventually sold it to a company called RealNetworks, which co-owned and ran Rhapsody with MTV for many years after I left.
So far, I’ve written four books. The first is about student life at Harvard Business School. The second is about the rise of the internet as a commercial medium, which I wrote as all that was happening.
I followed these with two science fiction novels published by Random House. Year Zero is the tale of a vast alien civilization that’s so into American pop music that they accidentally commit the biggest copyright infringement since the dawn of time, thereby bankrupting the entire universe. Yes, it’s based on a true story. I’m also astonished to report that it was (briefly) a New York Times bestseller.
I followed this with After On. It’s set in a diabolical San Francisco-based social media company which attains consciousness. Rather than becoming an omnicidal robot bent on humanity’s extinction, it takes its character from its roots in social networking, and basically becomes a super-empowered, hyper-intelligent, 14-year-old mean girl.
While it’s obviously somewhat playful, and obviously based on another true story, After On is also a serious meditation on super AI risk, the nature of consciousness, social media toxicity, and existential dangers connected to synthetic biology. That last topic retains a significant presence in my life to this day. After On also led directly to my podcast of the same name. This became a series of in-depth interviews, mostly with world-class scientists. My audience grew well north of 50,000 people, and two of my episodes ultimately reached millions.
I did the show full-time for a couple of years, and typically prepared 40+ hours for each of my scientific interviews. This is what it takes to learn every guest’s field deeply enough to then structure an interview that can convey the bulk of what I learned to my listeners in roughly two hours.
All that is very labor-intensive. But it’s also a feast for the mind and an absolute joy – because my guests are like tutors, guiding me to the papers, lectures, and books necessary to truly understand their work. Someday I’m sure I’ll return my full attention to my podcast. But for now, my investing work has captured my mind and my heart, and it’s consuming enough that I’m lucky to squeeze out one episode a year.
My public service/voluntary life is dominated by work and communications in the field of biorisk. Several artifacts of that work are on this site’s front page, and will give you a good overview of what I’ve done. The collision of the two fields that fascinate me the most – AI and synthetic biology – is filled with immense promise for humanity, but also extraordinary risk.
I’ve invested many hours into identifying and articulating the protective steps we can take in ways that are accessible to nonexperts, and which have occasionally reached wide audiences. I plan to continue this for as long as I believe this can be of use.
