Personal & Chronological Long Bio
There’s a more personal way to tell the story of Peter Leyden’s life and career that is best told through his own first-person voice.
Leyden wrote this more personal version during the pandemic when many of us had time to reflect on our lives and what was truly important.
Here you can follow the chronological story of his life that starts as a midwestern middle-class kid in the heartland and follows the trajectory of his career throughout America and around the world.
My life has been driven by several core obsessions that keep building on each other over time. They started at an early age as a middle class kid growing up in the American heartland in Minnesota. They continued with me as I went to elite universities and grad schools on the East Coast. They drove me as I lived abroad and traveled to more than 50 countries as a young man.
I’m always trying to understand the big-picture story of our times and how we will be seen in the long view of history. I’m continually processing almost everything I learn in today’s world and thinking through how generations to come will understand it. What will really matter about the era we live in today?
I’ve consequently become obsessed with figuring out the future, particularly the next several decades. This became especially true since I moved to San Francisco more than 25 years ago to work at the early Wired magazine and started building my network in Silicon Valley and the region. I've developed a particular expertise in understanding how new technologies will impact our economy and society. But I’ve also broadened my understanding of the many forces that will shape the world going forward.
I’m motivated by a mission to help solve our era’s big challenges and build a world that works better for everyone over the long haul. I believe we are living through an extraordinary moment in time that will be remembered as a transformative era with few parallels in American or even world history. We need to solve a daunting series of complex challenges like climate change. And so I need to do what I can at this historic juncture to help bring about a better world.
Three Core Obsessions Through My Life
The main method I’ve used to figure out that big-picture story and better understand the emerging future has been to seek out remarkable innovators in a wide range of fields. I’ve developed a talent over the years for engaging these kinds of people in long conversations about three main things: What’s the really important story going on in their fields today, what probably will come about in the near-term future, and what’s possible to achieve if we do everything right. It turns out that remarkable people almost always want to talk about those three things too.
My tendency is to go broad rather than deep. This is rooted in an intellectual curiosity and a desire to understand as much as I can about the world. But over time I’ve found that my value comes in making horizontal connections between fields rather than drilling down into any one field. There’s too few of us making the critical cross-connects between silos.
I’ve earned a living over the years through various forms of synthesizing all these inputs into strategic insights about the future and what’s really going on in today’s world, and then explaining it all to others in a variety of public or private ways.
How Those Obsessions Play Out in My Work
I began my career as a journalist focused mostly on the story of today and all that I communicated was public. I started at American newspapers in the Deep South, New England, and the Midwest. I went abroad to cover the big story of the rise of Asia and China and worked as a special correspondent for Newsweek.
I then shifted very early to the next big story of the rise of the internet and that soon landed me with the nascent founding team at Wired magazine in San Francisco. Wired was one of the first to tell the world-historical story of the digital revolution, and we were all about figuring out the positive future that could come out of it. We also were not just chronicling the story but helping create the new world too. Wired was a startup that helped invent the first generation of online media on the web.
Wired played a catalytic role in my career. It helped me shift from just covering the story of today to mostly figuring out the future. It helped me move from a neutral observer watching what’s happening to an active entrepreneur making things happen. I ended up as managing editor running the magazine and that gave me the experience to later found two of my own media startups. I also coauthored an influential cover story that I developed into my first book called The Long Boom: A Future History of the World, 1980 to 2020.
Initially Covering the Big Story of Our Times
I then began giving keynote talks about new technologies and the future through Keppler Speakers. I mostly give them to business audiences and have helped kick off a wide range of conferences all over America over the last 20 years. But I also give more intimate presentations and drive conversations with senior executives and leaders of organizations, and quite a bit of that has been in Europe.
I had a second formative career experience when I went to work for Global Business Network, a pioneering think tank on the future and an influential strategic foresight consulting firm. I went to GBN to learn the tools of the foresight business like scenario planning and design thinking, but also how to develop strategies that can make for change. I also wanted to learn from the masters, particularly cofounder Stewart Brand who had a unique talent for curating networks of remarkable innovators and bringing them together to solve complex problems that stymied others.
The Work of Understanding & Explaining the Future
I was now not just an observer but an actor trying to make change, and that accounts for my next move into politics. I spent the four years leading into Barack Obama’s historic 2008 election campaign helping figure out how to do politics on the internet. I cofounded an institute that brought technologists from Silicon Valley to Washington DC for public and private sessions on how this transition might be done.
I then founded a succession of two of my own media startups that built on the concept of using the new digital tools of the internet to better understand the emerging issues of the future and accelerate innovation around how to solve them. Reinvent, the most recent company founded in 2012, pioneered the early world of interactive group video that flourished in the pandemic. We used that nascent platform to connect up diverse networks of innovators to find new ways forward in projects like the future of work, done in partnership with companies like Airbnb.
I also hosted physical event series in San Francisco and New York that we live-streamed through the web. Each month I would interview a top technologist, entrepreneur or thought leader and invite a select group of innovators who built a vibrant community of change-makers over time. Alas, the pandemic ended those physical gatherings, as well as Reinvent.
The Entrepreneurial Work of Making Change
I’m an unusual blend of intellectual and entrepreneur and throughout my career I have moved easily between those two worlds. Sometimes I’m more the intellectual, the creator working in the world of ideas as speaker, author, writer, host. Other times I’m more the entrepreneur, the founder or innovator working within organizations pioneering new fields.
For the 15 years from 2005 to 2020 I had been primarily working in the entrepreneurial realm by founding and running three successive startups. The pandemic of 2020 gave me the time to step back and gear up for the next stage of my work life where I move back primarily into the intellectual realm and more autonomous work.
I now am primarily concentrating on three main roles: AI and tech expert and thought leader on the future, though my speaking and writing, and senior advisor on strategic foresight, working with the leaders of organizations,
The three core obsessions animating my entire career are more relevant today than ever. In fact, there’s never been a greater need to understand what’s really going on in the big-picture story of our time, to figure out the near-term future of the next 10 to 25 years, and to help solve the big challenges of climate change, economic inequality, and political polarization, to name a few.
As I wrote in the beginning, I believe we are living through an extraordinary moment in history that will be remembered for generations if not centuries to come. I think we are in the relatively early stages of a societal transformation to a different kind of civilization that will become increasingly apparent through the 21st century.
Follow what I’m doing now to understand that big-picture story of our time, figure out that emerging future, and help reinvent that better world. This website is a great place to start.
