About Peter Leyden
Peter Leyden is an unusual blend of both intellectual and entrepreneur whose career figuring out the future and explaining what’s coming to others can be clustered into two tracks:
In the intellectual one, Leyden is known as a thought leader, keynote speaker, author, writer and former journalist. He’s currently most known as creator of The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050.
In the other entrepreneurial track, he is known as a frequent founder and advisor. He’s currently the founder of Reinvent Futures, where he advises senior leaders in strategic foresight, and which has its own website.
This website ties all the threads together, starting with this overview of his career and what he does now. If you want shorter professional bios go to Bios. If you want the chronological story of his career in his personal voice go to Personal Bio.
Thought Leader on AI, New Technologies & the Future
Peter Leyden is a tech expert and thought leader on artificial intelligence, the implications of transformative technologies like clean energy, and the positive possibilities of the near future.
Leyden has followed the front edge of technological change ever since coming to San Francisco to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the beginning of the Digital Age and the arrival of the internet.
His first book The Long Boom foretold from that time how the digital economy would transform the world over the next 25 years — and largely did.
That started him giving keynote talks as a tech expert and futurist on roughly a monthly basis throughout America and occasionally Europe that continues to this day.
Over the years he has become a gifted storyteller who uses dramatic images and compelling infographics in presentations that are both highly informative and entertaining.
Creator of The Great Progression 2025 to 2050
Leyden has become known as for figuring out the potentially positive impacts of transformative technologies and his writing and keynotes are generally optimistic takes on what’s possible in the near future. He is frequently interviewed by the media or on podcasts.
The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 is his latest iteration of helping others see the positive possibilities of AI and other transformative technologies like clean energy and bioengineering, and how we could make the most of them in the next 25 years.
The Great Progression Substack series, magazine piece, and frequent keynotes do for The AI Age what The Long Boom did for the Digital Age.
They lay out a new grand narrative about how we could harness these technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world from in the next 25 years.
Host of The AI Age Begins event series in San Francisco
Leyden is well positioned to give audiences a comprehensive understanding of all the key issues surrounding Artificial Intelligence after hosting one of the premier event series at ground zero in San Francisco called The AI Age Begins for the two years after Generative AI burst on the scene.
He convened an extraordinary network of top tech experts in the region to come up with answers to the key issues surrounding the arrival of this world-changing tool.
The invite-only events maxed out with 300 innovators in the top floor of the iconic Ferry Building and attracted top journalists from The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Forbes, Reuters and Axios, among others.
The Founder of Reinvent Futures for Foresight Advising
Today Leyden is founder of his own strategic foresight firm Reinvent Futures, where he advises senior leaders on the four key questions that he has pursued throughout his career:
What’s really going on today? What’s probably coming in the next decade? What’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years? And what should we do now?
He frequently works closely with C Suites, Boards, and other senior leaders in a wide variety of industries and fields. They always find these private advisory projects valuable and ahead of the curve.
Wired Magazine & Founder of Two Media Startups
Leyden came to San Francisco to work with the founders of Wired as a Senior Editor and eventually Managing Editor in the 1990s when the magazine was considered one of the leading authorities in the world explaining the digital revolution. Wired at that time also was a driving force pioneering the early online media of the Web 1.0.
Leyden subsequently founded and ran two of his own media startups focused on the future that also pioneered some of the key next stages of online media.
His Next Agenda first took advantage of the dramatically lower costs of online video via Youtube to scale up the reach of physical conferences.
His Reinvent then helped pioneer the early world of interactive online video by creating virtual events that have now become familiar to everyone via Zoom.
The Foresight Business & Coauthor of Two Books on the Future
Leyden learned the futures business working at the pioneering strategic foresight and scenario planning firm Global Business Network, working with the legendary Stewart Brand (in photo). GBN was considered one of the leading firms in the world helping top corporations and advanced government agencies better prepare for the future.
Brand curated a network of remarkable innovators in a wide range of fields who were convened for challenging projects. Leyden worked closely cultivating that network for four years.
Leyden is the coauthor of two influential books on the future that were published in multiple languages. The Long Boom was written in the late 1990s but told the story of the world until 2020, which explained how the nascent digital economy and accelerating globalization would change the world - and mostly did.
His second book What’s Next drew off deep interviews with the GBN network and laid out what to expect in the decade after the Dotcom collapse and 9/11.
A Political Startup & Foreign Correspondent
Leyden spent a four-year cycle helping transition politics to the internet by taking top technologists from Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area to Washington D.C. on a monthly basis through a political startup he cofounded called The New Politics Institute.
During that time he gave keynote talks to Rep. Nancy Pelosi and the entire House Democratic Caucus on their annual retreat, as well as to Sen. Chuck Shumer and the entire Senate Democratic Caucus on their annual retreat as well.
Leyden ended up serving on Barack Obama’s Technology and Media Advisory Committee as part of his groundbreaking 2008 presidential campaign.
Leyden started his career as a journalist learning about different regions of America by working on newspapers in the Deep South, New England and the Midwest.
He also worked as a foreign correspondent in Asia, mostly for Newsweek magazine, but also contributing to select newspapers, including The New York Times. He was based in South Korea, but covered stories in Japan and China, including during the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Global Travel & Ivy League Schools
Leyden has traveled to more than 50 countries in all major regions of the world. Much of that has been as a journalist or through business, but much has been driven by personal curiosity.
As a young man out of college he hitchhiked from London all the way through Africa to Capetown, and from the civil wars of Central America to Chicago. He also traveled to the Soviet Union and hitchhiked in Eastern Europe under communism.
Leyden excelled at the highest levels of the academic world on the east coast. He graduated summa sum laude at Georgetown University in Washington D. C. after designing his own interdisciplinary major in intellectual history that covered the major thinkers of Western Civilization since The Enlightenment.
He has two master’s degrees from Columbia University in New York., one in journalism and another in Comparative Politics.
From the Heartland to the San Francisco Bay Area
Leyden grew up in the heartland in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as the oldest of four kids in a middle class family before heading out to discover the rest of America and the world. He still frequently visits his three siblings and his mother who all still live there.
Leyden has lived for 30 years with his wife in Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they raised their daughter. He’s lived in the same house for that entire time, designing and building a separate home office, and constantly adding new tech gadgets from solar panels to an electric car.
He loves spending his free time mountain-biking in the hills of the region, camping and back-country skiing in the High Sierra mountains, reading and watching as much science fiction as possible, listening to live music, and still traveling to exotic places that he has yet to see.