Hosting & Convening Events
Ever since moving to San Francisco to work with the founders of WIRED magazine early in the Digital Revolution in the 1990s, Leyden has built up an extraordinary network of innovators in many different fields impacting the future.
Over the years Leyden has become very good at hosting gatherings that convene a wide range of technologists, entrepreneurs, intellectuals and creatives to cross-connect and learn together.
Leyden was host of What’s Now San Francisco, a very popular monthly physical event series that ran for five years before the pandemic, as well as many virtual series as well. He’s now got more gatherings in the works.
The Great Progression Series
The Great Progression Series is a new event series for 2023 that will systematically look at many of the key fields going through historic system changes and gather innovators who can help us figure out four things: what’s really going on in that field today, what’s probably coming in the decade ahead, what’s possible to achieve over the course of 25 years, and what we should be doing now.
Each month Leyden’s company Reinvent Futures hopes to look at a different field going through a transformation in the 2020s as part of the larger transformation happening across many other fields throughout America and the world.
Each month we hope to hold one or more of three kinds of events: a large gathering of more than 100 people in a hip club in San Francisco that starts with a conversation with a world-class talent and ends in more like a party, a dinner conversation of a dozen or so innovators in a private room for a deep dive, and a virtual salon that can connect participants from around the world.
Each month we expect to create media artifacts that the participants can share within their network: a newsletter by Leyden that synthesizes what we learned that month, and an audio podcast and transcript when we hold one of the big events.
Right now, we are looking for the right partner or partners with the network and resources that can help Reinvent Futures launch and carry out The Great Progression Series in 2023. Use the Contact form on this website if interested in learning more.
What’s Now San Francisco
In the five years before the pandemic, Leyden hosted What's Now San Francisco, a monthly series of physical events where he publicly interviewed a remarkable innovator from a field going through big changes to talk about what they were working on now and what they saw coming next.
The whole interview was done before an invite-only audience of about 125 people and live-streamed to the web through a sophisticated three-camera shoot. You can watch the entire series through a playlist on YouTube.
Or watch the adjacent video on a remarkable gathering of a who’s who of Silicon Valley luminaries to pay tribute to the one-and-only Stewart Brand, a longtime mentor of Leyden’s.
What’s Now New York
The What’s Now series was so successful in San Francisco, with each event becoming maxed out and regulars wanting to return each month, that Leyden expanded the concept to What’s Now New York.
Leyden then began building a similar network through an invite-only audience and built a comparable body of work that can still be watched on a playlist in YouTube.
You can watch the last event with Kara Swisher held on the week before the entire United States locked down for the pandemic - and ended the series.
The Civilization Salons
During the pandemic, Leyden was the host and moderator of a series of Civilization Salons on the most consequential issues of the next 25 years and beyond. These intimate virtual gatherings operated like intellectual dinner parties with free-flowing discussions among about a dozen leading innovators from a wide range of fields.
The Salons were convened by the board of The Long Now Foundation, which was founded 25 years ago by Stewart Brand and a handful of others to foster more long-term thinking about issues on a civilizational scale. The Long Now board launched this private series to better understand the most important issues that will define the next 25 years and expand the Long Now network into the next generation.
Each Salon took a timeless issue - like Work or Commerce or Governance - and began the conversation with each participant bringing a question about that issue in 25 years that they would love to know more about now. This sparked an emergent conversation among the group about the major themes and the critical uncertainties around that issue in the decades ahead. The Salons were discontinued when society opened back up after the pandemic in summer 2022.