Our Team of Experts

Next Agenda is working on the front edge of the new media field of web video, and it is pushing the boundaries of what can be done with collaborative web tools, a field that is churning with experimentation and is constantly in flux. We are bonafide experts in how to apply these new tools in the best way possible to help organizations solve complex problems. Like any startup, we're hugely dependent on our team. Who makes up our team? Who makes up our extended network that we can draw off of whenever needed?

Pete Leyden

Pete Leyden is the Founder and CEO of Next Agenda. Leyden is a former managing editor of the original Wired magazine, which helped define the digital revolution and invent the early World Wide Web. He was the director of the New Politics Institute, which helped transition people in politics to the new media tools like web video and social networking that ultimately culminated in Barack Obama's transformative campaign in 2008. He has also worked at the Global Business Network, helping large companies tackle large problems; and as a special coorespondant for Newsweek in Asia.

Matt Sengbusch

Matt Sengbusch is an expert in our web tools and web development. Matt brings a diverse range of skills, understanding how to deal with the back-end of video and video production, and also web design and web development, as well as the backend of new tool developments. Matt pulls all that together for Next Agenda and can also tailor it to what other organizations need.

Michael Filtz

Michael Filtz brings expertise in web video and web collaboration tools. He comes at this with the eye of a journalist, and knows how to tell great stories through the medium of web video as well as the written word and to identify emergent ideas in collaborative environments to amplify their impact.

Jim Kiles

Jim Kiles is a long-time veteran of Silicon Valley, probably best known for being director of strategy for Intel Capital in which he was responsible for investing in and growing more than 60 startup companies, often with a media focus. Jim is a long-time entrepreneur who knows everything about starting a startup – from the early innovative period through steering the company to long-term growth.

Ben Shick

Ben Schick brings expertise in video and the visual medias of television, film, and animation. He was CEO of Media One Services, the number one independent video studios in San Francisco, in which many of the broadcast and cable news shows video their talking heads as well as many corporations use their services to capture their meetings and get them viewed around the world. Ben brings that expertise and others working in animation and in film to apply that to this frontage of web video, combining the maturity of the old media with the innovation of the new.

Our Team

Here you can go deeper into the bios of Next Agenda's core team and also see video of some of them and some of the things that they've done. We also give you bios of our key partners who extend our skillset and reach in the worlds of design, web development and video shooting editing and production. And then we also give you some of our advisors and initial investors who helped give us our start and guide us today.

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From the Blog

Update: Our Work for the Breakthrough Institute's Inaugural Conference

by: michael.filtz

10/12/2011 - 9:58pm

This is just a quick update to let everybody know about what the Next Agenda team has been doing. We spent a lot of the summer working with the Breakthrough Institute, covering their inaugural Breakthrough Dialogue conference, "Modernizing Liberalism." The conference, which was put on in conjunction with launch of a new journal, brought together dozens of top thinkers from a range of disciplines to figure out new ideas that could adapt liberalism to today's realities.