Peter Leyden is an accomplished speaker, with long experience giving keynotes in conferences, as well as tailoring talks and workshops to smaller groups of senior executives at organizations in the United States and throughout Europe. Leyden has had diverse experiences throughout his career, which he draws from constantly in developing his provocative talks that audiences find stimulating, and always entertaining. 

A Tech Entrepreneur

Leyden is the founder and CEO of Next Agenda, a new media company that is helping organizations solve complex challenges through the innovative use of video and next generation web tools. Leyden founded the company on the model of a Silicon Valley startup in the summer of 2008, and has led the development of a unique way of using video to link physical meetings with the online world. With his team, Leyden has developed new  web tools tools, which allow organizations to scale-up collaboration, particularly around video.

A Future Trend Expert

Leyden was involved in the early stages of Wired magazine, which helped introduce the world to the Digital Revolution and the Internet in the 1990s. At the magazine, Leyden was initially a senior editor overseeing many of the features and cover pieces, and later became the managing editor running the entire magazine. Wired, at that time, was one of the key innovators in the early World Wide Web, having the first commercial website on the web, and, among other innovative developments, invented the Banner Ad. At Wired, Leyden straddled both the print and the online world and developed a keen understanding of everything in the nascent new media field, and also the large future trends that Wired became famous for.

A Political Innovator

In the wake of the 2004 election, Leyden helped found and lead the New Politics Institute, a think tank helping people in politics understand the shifts going on in new media, technology and demographics -  and invent a new way of doing politics with these new tools. Leyden and his network through NPI, particularly helped the Democrats master nascent tools such as Youtube, Facebook, and text messaging to help transform the way politics was conducted. His work led directly into the campaign of Barack Obama and culminated in Obama's remarkable set of victories in the primaries and the general election.

A Business Pioneer

Leyden worked at Global Business Network, a pioneering think tank that made early use of the Internet, and built a network of remarkable experts from many diverse fields. GBN was known as a go-to organization for companies and governments around the world that needed to solve problems with no ready answers. GBN would pull together teams of diverse experts from different fields to help come up with innovative, breakthrough solutions for complex problems. GBN also maintained a think tank of the future, which consistently explored emerging developments in technology, demographics, globalization, and other fields that would make strategic impacts on long-term plans of organizations of all sorts. Leyden was at the center of that network of experts, and was one of the directors of that futures think tank for years.

An Author

Leyden is the coauthor of two books; one is The Long Boom, a History of the Future 1980-2020, which was translated into seven languages. This book was a big-picture analysis of the unprecedented transition the world is going through, marked by the meta-trends of the transformation of computers and telecommunications, globalization of the planet, and the rise of new challenges like climate change.

Leyden also wrote What's Next, which explored the new business trends in the wake of the catastrophe of 9/11. The book was based on a series of 50 interviews with remarkable experts in a range of fields that will impact the future. Its focus was how the business world would need to adapt to those changes.

Through both of these books, Leyden had to master many different fields and find ways of explaining complex issues in compelling, meaningful ways so that general audiences could understand the larger trends.

A Journalist

Leyden began his career as a journalist. He worked in several large metropolitan daily newspapers all over the country, including the Deep South, New England, and the Midwest, covering the gamut of newspaper beats. He also did a stint as a foreign correspondent, in Asia in the late 1980s, where he was based in South Korea working for Newsweek magazine. He also spent quite a bit of time in Japan and China, including in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Leyden, both professionally and personally, has traveled to all the main continents and every major region of the world, to a total of more than 50 different countries. He brings a global perspective and a familiarity with different countries and cultures to all the talks he gives.

An Academic

Leyden has two master's degrees from Columbia University in New York - one in political economy, in which he studied comparative politics and global economics. He also has a master's degree in journalism, from Columbia's School of Journalism, one of the premier journalism schools in the world. Leyden's undergraduate degree is from Georgetown University, where he designed his own major in intellectual history and graduated Summa Cum Laude.

Leyden works in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and daughter.