Peter Leyden has spent his career in a wide range of roles figuring out the future, explaining what’s probably coming next, and helping envision how we can build a better world. He came to San Francisco at the beginning of the digital revolution to work with the founders of WIRED magazine, he then learned the futures business working with the founders of the pioneering strategic foresight firm Global Business Network, and eventually founded two of his own media startups focused on the future.

Leyden now is considered a thought leader on the future, the impact of new technologies, and the repercussions of megatrends primarily known through his speaking and writing. He has worked for 25 years as a futurist and tech expert through Keppler Speakers, giving keynotes on roughly a monthly basis throughout America and periodically Europe. He’s written two influential books on the future and most recently popular online pieces like The Great Progression, 2025 to 2050.  He is regularly interviewed by the media and podcasts. 

Leyden also is a senior advisor on strategic foresight operating through his firm Reinvent Futures. He frequently takes what he learns about the future and helps C-suite executives and senior leaders of organizations 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 tailored talks and workshops. 

One of the main ways Leyden learns about the future is by hosting physical and virtual events and convening an extraordinary network of innovators, technologists, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and creatives in a wide range of fields impacting the future who he has met in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1990s. Leyden hosted the popular What’s Now San Francisco event series each month for five years before the pandemic. During the pandemic, he hosted the virtual Civilization Salons with The Long Now Foundation, the premier place in the world for thinking about very long-term change.

Leyden will host and convene a new series of physical and virtual events with media in 2023 called The Great Progression, which each month will look at a field going through a fundamental system change in the 2020s that could lead to great progress. He will convene top innovators in each field and get their ideas on what’s really going on in the field, what’s probably coming in the next 10 years, what’s possible to achieve in the next 25 years, and what we should do now. The series will be run by his Reinvent Futures and eventually cover the progress happening in a wide range of fields from energy to transportation to artificial intelligence to synthetic biology to economics and politics – all with an eye towards how we can solve the great challenges of our time like climate change.

Peter Leyden has held an unusually wide range of roles in different fields over the years that add up to make him exceptionally valuable at giving comprehensive insights into the decades ahead. They include stints in politics and work as a foreign correspondent abroad. What follows dives deeper into more details:

At WIRED in the 1990s, Leyden eventually became Managing Editor running the magazine when it 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 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 in Web 2.0. 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. 

Leyden learned all about strategic foresight and scenario planning working with the founders who helped pioneer those tools and methodologies at Global Business Network. GBN was considered one of the leading firms in the world helping top corporations and advanced government agencies better prepare for the future.

Leyden worked closely with the legendary Stewart Brand who curated a network of remarkable innovators in a wide range of fields who were convened for challenging projects that few others could solve.

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 50 world-class thought leaders and laid out what to expect in the decade after the Dotcom collapse and 9/11.

Leyden spent a four-year cycle helping transition politics to the internet by taking top technologists from Silicon Valley to Washington D.C. each month 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 Schumer 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. He has traveled to more than 50 countries in all major regions of the world.

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.

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. Leyden has lived for almost 30 years with his wife and daughter in Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You can find more about him and see much of his recent work at PeterLeyden.com.