Short Documentary-Style Videos of Leyden
Leyden founded and ran two investor-backed media startups that helped pioneer the emerging new mediums of web video and then interactive group video. In other words he and his team helped figure out best to use this new thing called YouTube and then the next new thing called Zoom.
His first company Next Agenda was trying to figure out how to take advantage of the plunging costs of capturing video, editing video, and then storing video for distribution, mostly on YouTube. One way was to see how you could capture physical events like conferences and explore those elite gatherings to wider audiences.
His second company Reinvent shifted to how to use interactive group video (initially Skype and Google Hangouts) to convene those high-end conversations and even conferences online from the start, and capture them even cheaper.
You can see various short, highly-produced videos below that Leyden narrated on camera to explain to early audiences who were used to television and documentary film how the new mediums of video could be leveraged to new ends.
Cambridge England Economist Summit Coverage
Leyden and his team helped George Soros launch The Institute for New Economic Thinking and they covered the inaugural conference in the University of Cambridge in England, home of John Maynard Keynes.
The conference attracted half a dozen Nobel Laureates in Economics and many of the top economists in the world. Leyden’s Next Agenda tried to get the ideas that emerged out to much wider audiences than the 250 or so elites who could physically attend.
The adjacent short video shows how they did that.
Paris France Executive Summit Video Shorts
Leyden’s team also worked with global businesses who each year gather their top executives and clients for a handful of days before everyone scatters all over the planet until the following year.
They tried to cost-effectively capture what went on for those who could not attend but wanted to stay abreast of what was accomplished.
This video of a gathering by the global tech consulting firm Sogeti in a chateau outside Paris shows how that technique evolved.
Breakthrough Institute Summit in San Francisco
Back in the San Francisco Bay Area, Leyden and his company worked with another Think Tank that had grown quite influential, The Breakthrough Institute, to cover their annul conference but also get their ideas into wider circulation.
This video shows how they used green screens and video graphics to capture complex ideas about how to reinvigorate Liberalism.
This video featuring Leyden shows how that worked behind-the-scenes.
Overview of a Pioneering Video Series
Leyden’s next media startup Reinvent shifted all the action online through nascent group video. The medium for gathering became the message for getting the word out.
This highly-produced video narrated by Leyden explained what the company accomplished in a full series of weekly gatherings that went on for months.
The quality of the video was rougher than in physical settings due to the limits of bandwidth at the time. But they used similar narration techniques to television to sum up what happened.
Reinvent did many such series but this is a great example of the genre and showcases many well-known thought leaders like Michael Pollan and Kevin Kelly.
The Clean Energy Challenge Gathering
Leyden’s first media startup Next Agenda also tried to convene its own summits and try out some experimental video techniques.
In this case they gathered many of the pioneers in the clean energy industry in the Presidio in San Francisco when solar and electric vehicles were just starting to become commercially viable in the very early days like 2010.
This video shows Leyden laying out the concept of “The Clean Energy Challenge” to the 250 or so experts who gathered, and who you can see in the audience as well.