Venkatesh Rao (writer)

Last updated
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao (8452380933).jpg
Born1974
Jamshedpur, India
OccupationAuthor, consultant
NationalityIndian, American
Alma mater University of Michigan
Period2007–present
GenreEssays, Literary Nonfiction, Sociology
SubjectSilicon Valley, technology, strategy
Literary movementPost-Rationality
Notable worksThe Gervais Principle, Tempo
Website
venkateshrao.com

Venkatesh Rao (born 1973) is an Indian-American author and consultant. He has previously worked as a researcher at Cornell University and Xerox. [1]

Contents

After resigning from Xerox in 2011, Rao worked as an independent consultant in Seattle and published his popular Breaking Smart newsletter series while writing his blog Ribbonfarm. [2] He was a fellow at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles in 2019–20. [3]

Education

After graduating with a Bachelor of Technology degree in mechanical engineering in 1997 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, he secured an F1 visa to study in the United States. [4] Rao received his PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan. His dissertation, Team Formation and Breakup in Multiagent Systems, drew from "control theory, scheduling theory, and artificial intelligence" in an attempt solve multiagent problems in relation to "unmanned vehicle systems" and "autonomous constellations of spacecraft." [5]

Writing

Rao founded and regularly contributes to his blog Ribbonfarm. As a consultant for Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Andreesen Horowitz, he launched the Breaking Smart newsletter, which has been translated into multiple languages. [6] He's also written for Aeon, [7] The Atlantic , [8] Forbes , [9] and been a guest on The Atavist's Longform podcast. [10] In 2011, Rao published Tempo, a book on strategy and decision-making which has been praised by David Allen and Daniel H. Pink. [11] [12] His theories have influenced curator Troy Conrad Therrien's work at the Guggenheim Museum, and the 2018 Guggenheim Bilbao exhibition Architectural Effects prominently showcased his work. [13] He is also known to have coined the terms "premium mediocre" [14] and "domestic cozy". [15]

Personal life

Rao was born and raised in Jamshedpur (then in the state of Bihar, now in Jharkhand), the son of Hindu Brahmin parents from South India. He is an atheist. [16]

Having lived in many cities throughout the United States, Rao currently lives with his wife in Los Angeles. [17]

Related Research Articles

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Art museum in Bilbao, Spain

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. The museum was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Spain, with an exhibition of 250 contemporary works of art. Built alongside the Nervion River, which runs through the city of Bilbao to the Cantabrian Sea, it is one of several museums belonging to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and features permanent and visiting exhibits of works by Spanish and international artists. It is one of the largest museums in Spain. In 2020, the museum had 315,908 visitors, down 73 percent from 2019, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It ranked 73rd on the list of most-visited art museums in 2020.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Art museum in Manhattan, New York City

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum located at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, Hilla von Rebay. It adopted its current name in 1952, three years after the death of its founder Solomon R. Guggenheim.

Fujifilm Japanese conglomerate started as photographic film manufacturer

FUJIFILM Corporation, trading as Fujifilm, or simply Fuji, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, operating in the realms of photography, optics, office and medical electronics, biotechnology, and chemicals.

Management consulting is the practice of helping organizations to improve their performance. Organizations may draw upon the services of management consultants for a number of reasons, including gaining external advice and accessing consultants' specialized expertise.

Mark Weiser

Mark D. Weiser was a computer scientist and chief technology officer (CTO) at Xerox PARC. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988. Within Silicon Valley, Weiser was broadly viewed as a visionary and computer pioneer, and his ideas have influenced many of the world's leading computer scientists.

Steven Levitt American economist

Steven David Levitt is an American economist and co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics and its sequels. Levitt was the winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal for his work in the field of crime, and is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago as well as the Faculty Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change at the University of Chicago which incubates the Data Science for Everyone coalition. He was co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy published by the University of Chicago Press until December 2007. In 2009, Levitt co-founded TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He was chosen as one of Time magazine's "100 People Who Shape Our World" in 2006. A 2011 survey of economics professors named Levitt their fourth favorite living economist under the age of 60, after Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw and Daron Acemoglu.

Greg Behrendt American comedian and author

Gregory Behrendt is an American comedian and author. His work as a script consultant to the HBO sitcom Sex and the City paved the way for co-authoring of the New York Times bestsellerHe's Just Not That Into You (2004), later adapted into a film by the same name. Apart from that he also hosted two short-lived television shows, The Greg Behrendt Show (2006) and Greg Behrendt's Wake Up Call (2009).

Ram Pothineni Indian film actor

Ram Pothineni is an Indian actor who works in Telugu films. He made his debut with Devadasu (2006) which won him a Filmfare Award for Best Male Debut – South. He then went onto to play the lead in successful films such as Ready (2008), Kandireega (2011), Pandaga Chesko (2015), Nenu Sailaja (2016), Vunnadhi Okate Zindagi (2017), Hello Guru Prema Kosame (2018), iSmart Shankar (2019), and Red (2021).

Akshay Venkatesh Australian mathematician

Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.

Sudhir Venkatesh

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is an American sociologist and urban ethnographer. He is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology & African-American Studies at Columbia University, a position he has held continuously since 1999. In his work, Venkatesh has studied gangs and underground economies, public housing, advertising and technology. As of 2018, he is the Director of Signal: The Tech & Society Lab at Columbia University.

Stephanie Rose WittelsWachs is an American voice actress, activist, and author. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of the theatre company Rec Room Arts in Houston, Texas and the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of the podcast network Lemonada Media. Wachs also serves as the host of the podcast Last Day.

Clarence "Skip" Ellis was an American computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at the CU-Boulder, he was the director of the Collaboration Technology Research Group and a member of the Institute of Cognitive Science. Ellis was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science (1969), and the first African-American to be elected a Fellow of the ACM (1997). Ellis was a pioneer in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Groupware. He and his team at Xerox PARC created OfficeTalk, one of the first groupware systems. Ellis also pioneered Operational Transformation, which is a set of techniques that enables real-time collaborative editing of documents.

Teppo Felin is the Douglas D. Anderson Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. He is also the Founding Director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Study. From 2013 to 2021, Felin was Professor of Strategy at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on cognition, rationality, perception, organizational economics, markets and strategy.

Jenna Weiss-Berman is a podcast producer and co-founder of Pineapple Street Media. Formerly she was director of audio for BuzzFeed.

Pineapple Street Studios is a podcast studio based in Brooklyn, New York. In August 2019, it was acquired by Entercom. Pineapple’s work includes multi-episode narratives, investigative journalism, branded podcasts, and talk shows. They’ve created series for companies like Nike, Hulu, Netflix, HBO, and The New York Times. In 2020, they led all podcast companies with two Peabody Award nominations, for The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow and Running From COPS. Twelve of their shows have reached #1 on Apple Podcasts.

Robert Valley is a Canadian animator and visual graphic artist. He has a distinct visual style that is influenced by Peter Chung and Gorillaz creator Jamie Hewlett. Valley was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1969. After completing a four-year animation program in Vancouver, he moved to San Francisco in 1992.

Patrick Reinsborough

Patrick Reinsborough is an American writer, activist, social change theorist and practitioner. He is the co-author of Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements and Change the World and contributor to social movement anthologies including Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World and Beautiful Trouble: a toolbox for revolution.

<i>Venky Mama</i> Indian Telugu-language action comedy film

Venky Mama is a 2019 Indian Telugu-language action comedy film directed by K. S. Ravindra, and produced by D. Suresh Babu and T. G. Vishwa Prasad under Suresh Productions and People's Media Factory. The film stars Venkatesh, Naga Chaitanya, Raashi Khanna, and Payal Rajput, while Prakash Raj, Nassar, and Rao Ramesh in supporting roles. Music is composed by S. Thaman while Prasad Murella and Prawin Pudi handled cinematography and editing, respectively.

Fun & Serious Game Festival is a video game festival that takes place, in Bilbao, Spain, from late November to the beginning of December since its foundation in 2011. Its main objective is to recognize the cultural importance of video games. To do so, several leisure and training activities are celebrated, such as the VIT Talks and the Fun & Serious Awards.

<i>Untitled (One Eyed Man or Xerox Face)</i>

Untitled is a painting created by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982. In May 2021, it sold for $30.2 million at Christie's in Hong Kong.

References

  1. "Bio" . Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  2. Rao, Venkatesh. "Interview with Venkatesh Rao" (Interview). Interviewed by Dan Andrews. Tropical MBA.
  3. "Bio". 28 June 2019. Retrieved 2019-07-02.
  4. "What does Venkatesh Rao consider to be the big break of his career?". Quora. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
  5. Rao, Venkatesh (2004). Team Formation and Breakup in Multiagent Systems (Ph.D.). University of Michigan.
  6. Marc Andreeson (7 February 2015). "Introducing Breaking Smart" . Retrieved 2019-09-15.
  7. "Venkatesh Rao". Aeon.com. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  8. "Venkatesh Rao". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  9. "Venkatesh Rao". Forbes. Retrieved 2016-02-06.
  10. "Longform Podcast #174: Venkatesh Rao". Longform.org. January 6, 2016. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  11. "Tempo: timing, tactics, and strategy". January 6, 2016. Retrieved 2016-02-05.
  12. "Tempo: timing, tactics, and strategy in narrative decision-making" . Retrieved 2018-04-27.
  13. "Architectural Effects explores the Bilbao effect". 11 December 2018. Retrieved 2019-05-20.
  14. "Will you be able to afford a flat if you stop buying avocado toast?". 8 December 2017.
  15. "Why are so many brands pivoting to coziness?". 15 January 2020.
  16. "King Ruinous and the City of Darkness". 11 November 2016. Retrieved 2019-07-02.
  17. "Regenerations". 28 June 2019. Retrieved 2019-07-02.