Nova Spivack

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Nova Spivack (b. June 5, 1969) is an entrepreneur, semantic web pioneer, and technology visionary. He has co-founded EarthWeb in 1994, Radar Networks in 2003 and the San Francisco Web Innovators Network (SFWIN). He is also the founder of Lucid Ventures. He is the grandson of Peter Drucker, the management consultant guru.

[edit] Biography

Spivack grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts. While in high school, Spivak attended the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He then attended Oberlin College, where he studied philosophy, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Spivack worked at Ray Kurzweil’s pioneering optical character recognition company, Kurzweil Computer Products, which was later sold to Xerox. He also worked at Thinking Machines with Danny Hillis and participated in computer science research at MIT in the areas of parallel scientific computing. In 1992, Spivack was invited to participate in the graduate international business school program at The International Space University, the premier professional training program for the international space industry sponsored by NASA, the European Space Agency, and other leading space agencies. ^[1]

In early 1993, Spivack worked at Individual Inc., an artificial intelligence news-filtering venture.^[1] In 1994, he co-founded EarthWeb, an early Internet company, where he was Executive Vice-President for Products, Strategy and Marketing. EarthWeb went public in 1998. Later that year, Spivack left EarthWeb’s board of directors. The dot-com crash brought Earthweb troubled times and its content properties were acquired in 2000 by Internet.com. The company’s Dice.com property remained a stand-alone business until it was acquired for approximately $200 million in 2005. ^[2] After leaving Earthweb, Spivack was an early participant in space tourism, flying to the edge of space with the Russian Air Force and participating in zero-gravity training with the Russian space agency in 1999.

Spivack has been a student of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, art and culture and has pursued this interest in monasteries, refugee camps and communities in Nepal, India, Europe and the USA. Spivack focuses his philanthropic activities on helping to fund the preservation of Tibet’s wisdom culture as a world-heritage treasure for the benefit of future generations. ^[1]