About Peter Leyden
Peter Leyden is known on the web as a futurist, tech expert, strategic foresight advisor, thought leader, keynote speaker, author and writer, serial entrepreneur, and former journalist. This website ties all the threads together, starting with this overview of his career and what he does now.
If you want shorter, more conventional professional bios go to Bios. For a quick overview of every section of the website that ties together his body of work see the Home page. If you want the chronological story of his career and the evolution of his ideas in his personal voice go to Chronology.
Thought Leader on the Future & New Technologies
Peter Leyden has spent his career figuring out the future and helping others better understand what’s coming next. He’s done this in an unusually wide range of roles over the years that add up to make him exceptionally valuable. He’s been called a leading futurist, a top expert in new technologies, and a prescient thought leader and author. He’s been a keynote speaker and writer, a senior advisor and foresight analyst, a founder and serial entrepreneur, a host and convener of events, and a foreign correspondent and journalist.
Through all these roles Leyden has taken all that he learns and become great at explaining four key insights: what’s really going on now, what’s probably coming next, what’s possible to eventually achieve, and what you can immediately do. His current work focuses on three main roles:
Leyden is a thought leader on new technologies and future trends primarily through giving keynotes talks and writing. He has worked for 25 years as a futurist and tech expert through Keppler Speakers, giving talks to business conferences and general audiences on roughly a monthly basis throughout America and occasionally Europe. He’s written two influential books on the future and most recently written online series like The Transformation, six stories envisioning the next 30 years. He also is regularly interviewed by the media and podcasts.
Senior Advisor on Strategic Foresight & Convener of Events
Leyden is a senior advisor on strategic foresight now operating through his new firm Reinvent Futures. He frequently takes what he learns about the future and helps senior leaders of organizations, C-suite executives and boards think through the strategic implications of what’s coming in the decade ahead. He has worked with a range of companies, from Airbnb in its early days to Autodesk in the pandemic to less well-known organizations in one-day workshops.
Leyden also is a host and convener of physical and virtual events, most recently as host of the virtual Civilization Salons with The Long Now Foundation, the premier place for thinking about very long-term change. Since coming to San Francisco more than 25 years ago to work at Wired magazine, Leyden has built an extraordinary network of innovators, entrepreneurs and creatives in a wide range of fields who he draws off to convene intellectual gatherings. He hosted the popular What’s Now San Francisco event series each month for five years before the pandemic, and he’s now working on a potential new series called The Transformations Ahead.
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 Futures Business & Coauthor of Two Books
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, a cofounder and visionary in his own right, 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.
Foreign Correspondent & Political Startup
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 Catholic family. He lived the classic high school experience as student council president, captain of the basketball team and honors student 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 almost 30 years with his wife and daughter in Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area. 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.