Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS selected Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions. Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, Read More ›
Vered Caplan is the CEO of Orgenesis Inc, a global biotech company working to unlock the full potential of cell and gene therapies in an affordable and accessible format at the point of care. Orgenesis identifies promising new therapies and leverages its POCare Platform to provide a rapid, globally harmonized pathway for these therapies to reach and treat large numbers of patients at lowered costs through efficient, scalable, and decentralized production. Prior to Orgenesis, Vered has been CEO of Kamedis, a company focused on utilizing plant extracts for dermatology purposes. From 2004 to 2007, Ms. Caplan was CEO of GammaCan, a company focused on the use of immunoglobulins for the treatment of cancer. During the previous five years, Ms. Caplan Read More ›
Chairman, Milken Institute, author of Faster Cures
Editor
July 5, 2023
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Michael Milken, in full Michael Robert Milken, (born July 4, 1946, Encino, California, U.S.), American financier whose “junk-bond” operations fueled many of the corporate takeovers of the 1980s.
Andy Kessler is the author of Inside View, a column he writes for The Wall Street Journal on technology and markets and where they intersect with culture. He won the 2019 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary. He is the author of several books including Wall Street Meat and Eat People. He used to design chips at Bell Labs before working on Wall Street for PaineWebber and Morgan Stanley and then as a founder of the hedge fund Velocity Capital.
Michael D. Shellenberger is an American author and former public relations professional whose writing has focused on the intersection of politics, the environment, climate change and nuclear power, as well as more recently on how he believes progressivism is linked to homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition. He is also the founder of Environmental Progress.
Ariel Malik is a financial entrepreneur and investor that specializes in energy and biochemistry companies and the capital market. During his career, Ariel Malik has contributed greatly to the Israeli high-tech and energy industry. He promoted deals with foreign financial companies and venture funds that have invested in Israeli companies and startups. Among his notable accomplishments: Promoting the sale of Paradigm Geophysical to the Fox Paine Foundation (Paradigm was sold late on for about 1 billion dollars to the London Apax Foundation). In the last ten years, Ariel Malik has been a serial entrepreneur of advanced technology-based companies and research institutes in Israel and around the world. His main goal is to promote new technologies in the fields of medicine, Read More ›
Vice President at FreedomWorks, Editor of RealClearMarkets
Editor
October 19, 2022
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John Tamny Vice President at FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets, and Senior Economic Adviser to mutual fund firm Applied Finance Group. He frequently writes about the securities markets, along with tax, trade and monetary policy issues that impact those markets for a variety of publications including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and RealClearMarkets. Tamny is the author of six books. His latest is The Money Confusion (All Seasons Press). Others are When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason (Post Hill Press), which was released in 2021. Others include Popular Economics (Regnery, 2015), a primer on economics, Who Needs the Fed? (Encounter Books, 2016) about the central bank’s onrushing economic irrelevance, The End of Work Read More ›
Engineer, Entrepreneur, and Professor of Innovation
Editor
August 5, 2022
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Metcalfe is an engineer and entrepreneur from the United States who helped pioneer the Internet starting in 1970. He co-invented Ethernet, co-founded 3Com and formulated Metcalfe’s law, which describes the effect of a telecommunications network. Since January 2011, he has been Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise. Metcalfe has received various awards, including the IEEE Medal of Honor and National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his work developing Ethernet technology. In addition to his accomplishments, Metcalfe has made several predictions which failed to come to pass, separately forecasting the demise of the Internet, wireless networks, and open-source software during the 1990s.
He received his graduate degrees from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. From 2000 to 2001 he was with Nanovation Technologies as a designer and product manager for photonic devices. From 2001 to 2003 he was a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University working on self-assembly, biomedical devices (he co-invented the method resulting in the founding of Claros Diagnostics Inc. (acquired by OPKO Health)), and organic devices. He has been an assistant professor (2003-2008), an associate professor (2008-2012), and an affiliate professor (2012-present) in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington. He was with Google from 2010 to 2014 where he was a Google Distinguished Engineer and a Director at Google [x]. He Read More ›
Matt invests in a broad range of software and data driven companies with a focus on cloud computing, dataware, intelligent applications and the intersections of innovation (where life science and data science intersect). He believes in the Learning Loop for entrepreneurs who journey from curiosity to triangulation and decision making. This leads to positive outcomes and ongoing learnings. Before joining Madrona in 2000, Matt was vice president of business process for the Genuine Parts Company (NYSE:GPC). He also was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, concentrating on strategy and marketing in technology-driven sectors and prior to that worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse. For more about Matt and lessons learned from 20 years of VC investing, traits of top entrepreneurs, Read More ›
Trained as a mathematician and philosopher, Dr. Bill Dembski is a writer, editor, and researcher whose books and articles range over mathematics, engineering, philosophy, theology, and education. A board member and founding Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, Bill’s current work focuses on the connections linking freedom, technology, and education. To that end, Bill has become an entrepreneur who builds educational software and websites. Dr. Dembski has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. Dr. Dembski is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he earned a B.A. Read More ›
Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology
Editor
October 10, 2019
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Carver Andress Mead (born 1 May 1934) is an American scientist and engineer. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), having taught there for over 40 years. Mead is an enthusiastic instructor, and he advised the first female electrical engineering student at Caltech, Louise Kirkbride. His contributions as a teacher include the classic textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980), which he coauthored with Lynn Conway. A pioneer of modern microelectronics, he has made contributions to the development and design of semiconductors, digital chips, and silicon compilers, technologies which form the foundations of modern very-large-scale integration chip design. In the 1980s, he focused on Read More ›
