Short Bio
Nova Spivack is CEO and co-founder of Mindcorp.ai – an enterprise superintelligence company powering the next-evolution of research, analysis and strategy for F1000 customers. A prolific inventor, noted futurist, computer scientist, and technology pioneer, Nova was one of the earliest Web pioneers and helped to build many leading ventures including EarthWeb, The Daily Dot, Klout, and SRI’s venture incubator that launched Siri. Nova is also an active research scientist, with a substantial published research program in mathematical logic, formalization, and the foundations of physics, all archived on Zenodo at novaspivack.com/research. Nova flew to the edge of space in 1999 as one of the first space tourists, and was an early space angel-investor. As co-founder and chairman of the nonprofit charity, the Arch Mission Foundation, he leads an international effort to backup planet Earth, with a series of installations around the solar system. In 2024, he landed his second Lunar Library, on the Moon – comprising a 30 million page archive of human knowledge, including the Wikipedia and a library of books and other cultural archives. He has a strong humanitarian focus and works with a wide range of humanitarian projects, NGOs, and teams working to apply technology to improve the human condition.
Full-Length Bio
Nova Spivack is a technology entrepreneur, investor, innovator and futurist with a career spanning more than two decades of industry-leading breakthroughs. He has helped to build dozens of ventures and nearly 100 patents, collectively generating billions of dollars in market value, including multiple IPOs, and acquisitions by Apple, Facebook, Samsung, Disney, and others.
Nova Spivack CEO and co-founder of Mindcorp.ai – an enterprise superintelligence company powering the next-evolution of research, analysis and strategy for F1000 customers.
Nova is also an active research scientist, with a substantial published research program in mathematical logic, formalization, and the foundations of physics, all archived on Zenodo at novaspivack.com/research.
He is the Co-Founder and Chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF) which is building a solar-system scale backup of Earth, with locations deposited on Earth, the Moon and in solar orbit. One of the early space tourists and space entrepreneurs, Nova has had a long interest in helping to facilitate the growth of a spacefaring civilization. He flew to the edge of space in 1999, and did zero-gravity training, with Peter Diamandis and Richard Garriott, with the Russian Air Force and the Russian Space Agency. Nova also angel-invested in Zero Gravity Corporation, one of the early space tourism ventures.
Nova was ranked among the Top Futurists worldwide and as a Top LA Power Player in Technology. He has advised governments, presidential campaigns, Fortune 10 global corporations, leading consumer brands, venture funds, incubators, and tech startups.
Nova earned an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, from Oberlin College. During college he also participated in summer research at the MIT Computer Science Department. He received a graduate-level professional degree in Space Life Sciences from The International Space University in 1992.
Nova is the eldest grandson of the management guru, Peter Drucker. Nova is married to television producer and writer, Kimberly Rubin Spivack, and has a daughter, Sky.
Ventures and Nonprofits
Spivack’s first venture started in 1994, with Jack D. Hidary and Murray Hidary. Together they co-founded one of the first Internet companies, EarthWeb, which led to a record-breaking NASDAQ IPO in 1998, and a second IPO of spinout, DICE, in 2007.
EarthWeb began by doing the first online benefit concert for charity, working with dozens of international charities and relief agencies during the Rwanda hunger crisis. The company evolved to become one of the first commercial Web development agencies in the world, and then launched a set of online career, training and certification portals, for IT Professionals under the brands Developer.com and Dice.com.
After EarthWeb he worked with Stanford Research International (SRI), to co-found their technology incubator, nVention (now, SRI Ventures). While working with SRI, he also worked on the DARPA CALO program which was related to the development of SIRI, the intelligent iPhone assistant (sold to Apple).
With Nicholas Slavin and Anton Toutov, he co-founded Fuzionaire, a breakthrough new chemistry platform developed by Anton Toutov under Nobel Laureate, Prof. Bob Grubbs, at Caltech, and Fuzionaire Diagnostics, a new spin-out venture of Fuzionaire that is developing a platform for a disruptive generation of radiomarkers for PET-scan medical imaging, with the help of PET-scan co-inventor, Michael Phelps and a team of researchers at UCLA.
He Co-Founded one of the first consumer applications of the Semantic Web, Radar Networks (funded by Microsoft Co-founder, Paul Allen, and eventually acquired by Evri), which developed an ontology-driven Web portal for communities of interest called TWINE. He then co-founded Live Matrix with Sanjay Reddy (acquired by OVGuide, which was then acquired by FilmOn), which indexed virtually all live and scheduled events online to form an “interactive program guide” for the Web.
With Nicholas White and Josh Jones-Dilworth, Nova co-founded The Daily Dot, a leading online newspaper about online culture memes.
He was the first investor in social influence analytics company, Klout (sold to Lithium).
Nova also serves on the board of directors of Gil Elbaz’s Common Crawl Foundation, a 5+ billion page, free and open search index of the Web. Nova has also advised several venture funds and family offices; most recently, EES Ventures and Rewired.ai.
Nova is also the founder Vizzer, and Blocktag, both of which are in stealth mode.
He also helped to start the Earth Dashboard, a non-profit real-time visualization of the state of planet Earth.
Nova also works closely with a number of governments, royal families and sovereign funds to help advise and fund international humanitarian projects.
Physics and Computation
Nova is also an active research scientist, with a substantial research program in mathematical logic, formalization, and the foundations of physics, encompassing more than 100 scientific papers, dozens of software repositories and Lean formalization projects, all archived on Zenodo at novaspivack.com/research. and github.
His interest in computational physics formed in the late 1980’s, while a senior in high-school. While in high-school and college, Nova worked at two legendary artificial intelligence and supercomputing ventures: Ray Kurzweil‘s, Xerox Kurzweil and Danny Hillis’, Thinking Machines.
While at Kurzweil, he worked on neural networks, originally for a reading machine for the blind, that were then applied to optical character recognition. At Thinking Machines, he worked on physics projects related to the Connection Machine supercomputer. Thinking Machines attracted many of the greatest scientific and computing minds of the time for talks and events related to the applications of supercomputing, including physicist Richard Feynman, science and math prodigy, Stephen Wolfram, future founder of the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, and director of research and future Java and cloud computing leader, Lew Tucker — all of whom profoundly shaped Nova’s thinking as he started out, and for the rest of his career in technology. During that time, he wrote articles for the Encyclopedia of Computer Science, co-authored a manual for parallel Fortran for quantum physics, and with Ottavia Bassetti, built an Intranet hypertext knowledge network for the Thinking Machines research community around the world.
During his free time, steeped in the rich intellectual environment around MIT, Nova spent nights and weekends inside the MIT Media Lab, with friends working in labs on synthetic holography and virtual reality interfaces, as well as the community around Marvin Minsky, the intelligent agent community around Pattie Maes, and the interdisciplinary research community connected to artificial life pioneer, Chris Langton and the Santa Fe Institute.
During this time, Nova became intensely interested in cellular automata, digital physics, and chaos and complexity theory. In particular, after reading the book, Three Scientists and Their Gods, he became fascinated by, MIT Computer Science and AI Lab founder, Ed Fredkin, a pioneering thinker in the field of digital physics. Fredkin famously posited that the universe might literally just be software. This idea shaped much of Nova’s thinking and research. This led to independent research in Fredkin’s lab at MIT, under professors Thommaso Toffoli and Norman Margolus. Thanks to their generosity he was able to spend hundreds of hours running cellular automata experiments on a specialized supercomputer that they had developed for digital physics, described in their book, Cellular automata machines.
Also from his Thinking Machines days, Nova developed a friendship with the science prodigy and natural philosopher, Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, and author of A New Kind of Science. Later, Nova participated in the launch of Wolfram Alpha, and Wolfram became an advisor Nova’s Arch Mission Foundation.
Artificial Intelligence
Nova has worked in the field of AI for more than 30 years. As a child he participated as a subject in experiments at the MIT Computer Science Lab, studying how children interacted with early computer games. Later during high-school, thanks the influence of his good friend Joshua Kirshenbaum, he started learning to code and was active in the early pre-Internet world of BBSs. These experiences set the stage for a lifelong interest in computers and software development.
In subsequent decades, he participated in numerous AI projects and ventures, including early work with Ray Kurzweil and Danny Hillis, and a role on the largest government-funded AI project in US History, the DARPA CALO project, with SRI (which among many other things led to spinoffs such as SIRI).
This led to further work with Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen and others on the Semantic Web, and then further ventures that focused on real-time data analytics, social analytics, natural language processing, machine learning, time series analysis and automated trend detection, and real-time visualization – across a number of ventures.
More recently, Nova has focused his AI work through Mindcorp.ai, which has developed a proprietary enterprise superintelligence platform.
Memetics and Social Analytics
Nova is an expert on the subject of memetics and social analytics for trend detection. At the invitation of Secretary Madeleine Albright, he presented a multi-year series of invited talks on applying memetics to Diplomacy, at the Aspen Institute, for senior US Department of State leadership. These strategies were successfully applied by the US government to help combat the spread of violent extremism around the world.
Nova co-founded Bottlenose, an artificial intelligence and big data streaming analytics company, funded by KPMG, that was named a Gartner Cool Vendor for In-Memory Computing in 2016.
At Bottlenose, with co-founder Dominiek ter Heide and team, he developed and patented, Nerve Center, an AI and machine learning engine for memetics.
Nerve Center analyzed real-time linguistic and statistical activity across virtually all worldwide social media, news media, live TV and radio broadcasts to detect the emergence and development of patterns in society. This work was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series and his theory of psychohistory.
Nerve Center was used for detecting and measuring emerging social, political, economic, health and cultural trends by 50+ global brands, governments, advertising agencies, and at major world events such as the Olympics.
With Nicholas White and Josh Jones-Dilworth, Nova co-founded The Daily Dot, a leading online newspaper about online culture memes.
He was also the first investor in social influence analytics company, Klout (sold to Lithium), which used memetic approaches to rank the influence of users of social media.
After college, he also worked as a trend detection analyst for the pioneering AI-powered news filtering company, Individual. While working there he was responsible filtering several thousand news articles a day, from hundreds of media sources, into ~30 major topics, using a battery of intelligent agents — this generated daily strategic news briefings for the leadership of dozens of Fortune 100 companies.
Facilitating a Spacefaring Civilization
Nova has had a lifelong interest in space and the stars, perhaps in part due to the name his parents gave him, which means “new” in Latin, and also has an astronomical meaning.
At a young age he attended an early Space Shuttle launch with his grandmother and nephews, as a gift from NASA, to his Grandfather, who at that time advised NASA.
As one of the first space tourists, he flew to the edge of space in 1999, and did zero-gravity training, with Peter Diamandis and Richard Garriott, with the Russian Air Force and the Russian Space Agency.
He was a patron of the Commercial SpaceFlight Federation, and an early space angel investor in Zero Gravity Corporation (acquired by Space Adventures).
Nova earned a professional graduate-level certificate degree from The International Space University in Space Life Sciences, under the late Gerry Soffen, who pioneered the Viking Lander search for life on Mars at NASA.
While with ISU he also interned to help design the Space Humanities Program under Overview Effect thought-leader, Frank White and ISU co-founder Todd Hawley, and he worked on The Space Solar Power Program international design project.
In his sophomore year of college, Nova interned as a production assistant at Paramount Studios, working on the popular television show, Star Trek, The Next Generation.
Nova is co-founder and Chairman of the Arch Mission Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation working to backup planet Earth around the solar system.
The First Lunar Library. In April 2019, when the Lunar Library crash-landed on the Moon, inside SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander, Nova became the first civilian to land something on another planetary body. The Lunar Library 1 contained a 30-million page backup of planet Earth, including the Wikipedia, and many other data sets, including David Copperfield’s magic secrets, along with physical samples from relics and sacred sites around the world. Later it was also rumored that a set of secret “Vaults” in the Lunar Library may have included the first library of DNA beyond Earth, including alleged Tardigrades, and the DNA of 25 humans.
The Second Lunar Library. On February, 22, 2024, the Lunar Library, Galactic Legacy Archive, was successfully landed on the Moon by Intuitive Machines, where it will reside for up to 5 billion years. The content includes the Wikipedia and many special collections (but no tardigrades or biological material). Prior to the Lunar Library, the AMF successfully delivered the Solar Library, the first permanent library in space, on February 6, 2018, into multi-million year orbit around the Sun, as the secret payload of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy test launch. These two libraries are expected to last for up to billions of years, making them the longest-lasting records of human civilization in our solar system. The Arch Mission Foundation has also deposited several Earth Libraries, most recently inside a deep mountain bunker in Switzerland
The Solar Library. Prior to the Lunar Library, the AMF successfully delivered the Solar Library, the first permanent library in space, on February 6, 2018, into multi-million year orbit around the Sun, as the secret payload of SpaceX’sFalcon Heavy test launch. These two libraries are expected to last for up to billions of years, making them the longest-lasting records of human civilization in our solar system.
Earth Libraries. The Arch Mission Foundation has also deposited several Earth Libraries, most recently inside a deep mountain bunker in Switzerland.
Articles
Nova has authored hundreds of articles and co-authored several books on Internet strategy and technology, and led the EarthWeb Press publishing imprint with Macmillan Computer Publishing.
Nova has been featured, cited, and has contributed guest articles in numerous media outlets. Partial list: AdWeek, Ars Technica, Atlantic Monthly, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, Business Insider, The BBC, CBS Evening News, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, CNBC, CNET, CNN, Der Spiegel, the Discovery Channel, Download Squad, the Economist, Entrepreneur, FOX News, the Financial Times, Gartner, GigaOm, the Guardian, Guidewire, The Independent, Industry Standard, Infoworld, Information Week, Interactive Age, International Herald Tribune, the L.A. Times, The London Times, Mashable, the MIT Technology Review, the New Scientist, Newsweek, New York Daily News, New York Post, the New York Times, NPR, the Observer UK, PC Magazine, PC World, Popular Science, New Scientist, ReadWriteWeb, Red Herring, Reuters, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Scientific American, SiliconAngle, Slashdot, Smithsonian Magazine, TechCrunch, The Telegraph, Time Magazine, the Times Online, USA Today, Venturebeat, VICE, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, WIRED and ZDNet
Talks
Nova has keynoted, given talks, moderated, and served as a judge at numerous conferences and industry events, including (partial list, in alphabetical order): AI Showbiz, The Aspen Institute, BlogTalk, Defrag, DEMO, DigitalNow, the Financial Times Digital Media Conference, Future in Review, GigaOm’s Bunker sessions, The Highlands Forum, the International Semantic Web Conference, the Island Forum, the Kleiner Perkins CIO Strategy Exchange, MIT’s Emtech, NextWeb, The Santa Fe Institute, SDForum, the Semantic Technology Conference, the Singularity Summit, Search Engine Strategies, SIBOS, Stanford/MIT’s VLAB, Supernova, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, The US Dept. of State, The Web 2.0 Summit, The White House and numerous government agencies, NGOs, and industry councils.
Nova has also given guest lectures and keynotes for the MBA programs and entrepreneurship programs including Harvard University, Stanford University, Berkeley, Beijing University, and UCLA.
Patents
Nova has authored nearly 100 patents in areas including augmented reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning, high security, search, advertising, social media, mobile apps, the semantic web, virtual reality, interactive TV, and personalization.
In particular Nova invented what are now among the fundamental patents for augmented reality, in the early 2000’s, while developing an early AR mobile game concept.
In the mid 1990’s Nova co-authored a series of patents for early Web-TV convergence for a product called HyperTV, owned by ACTV. The patents covered simulcasting URLs and metadata on the television vertical blanking interval (VBI) in order to display relevant Web pages next to live television content on suitably instrumented TV’s and PCs. The patents were later sold to Disney.
Nova also has developed and sold many patented inventions in the areas of artificial intelligence, virtual intelligent assistants, virtual reality, search, and the Semantic Web.