Strikeforce: Inside Silicon Valley's Most Unusual Apprenticeship
As robots go, the three telepresence machines that wheeled themselves into a conference room in Culver City, Calif., in mid May were not exactly what one would call lifelike. Flatscreens mounted on stilts rising from a mobile base, operated from afar by flesh-and-blood humans sitting in front of keyboards, the robots were functionally little more than sophisticated teleconferencing gear. Some people Skype into business meetings, but that’s not forward-thinking enough for Peter Diamandis. So when he gathers the dozen or so employees of his company PHD Ventures for their monthly meetings, the off-site participants send robot stand-ins.
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“All right, you rebels!” says Diamandis, after the attendees are all in place. “Let’s go!” He calls this assemblage his Jedi Council; he is Obi-Wan, and they are his disciples.
Nobody blinks an eye at any of this. Rubbing elbows with robots is hardly the most fast-forward aspect of existence in the “Peter-verse.” The job, after all, of the mostly 20-something millennials assembled in this room (or beaming in from New Jersey or Seattle) is to translate Diamandis’ futurism into revenue-producing businesses.
Diamandis is a serial entrepreneur, an author and a public speaker who has started companies dedicated to commercial asteroid mining, zero-gravity flight, and the extension of human longevity, not to mention the XPrize Foundation (which describes itself as “an innovation engine [and] a facilitator of exponential change”) and Silicon Valley’s way-beyond-the-bleeding-edge Singularity University (more on that later). In other words, Peter Diamandis lives in the future. A future he is 100 percent confident will be great. Bring on the robots!
Diamandis says the Jedi Council meeting is his favorite day of the month, and it’s easy to see why. There’s a freewheeling sense that anything is possible. Updates on various Diamandis projects are interspersed with bursts of laughter. It’s fun to work here -- it’s
