Nova Spivack is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author.[1] He is the founder and CEO of the early stage science and technology incubator Magical[2] and co-founder of The Arch Mission Foundation.[3]
In the late 1980s, while a college student, Spivack developed software for Kurzweil Computer Products and later at Thinking Machines.[13][14] In 1993, Spivack worked at Individual, Inc., a venture that developed intelligent software to filter news sources.[13][14]
Nova Spivack co-founded EarthWeb, a website that provided career development resources and technical information to IT professionals, in 1994.[16] While at EarthWeb, Spivack helped establishments including AT&T, Sony, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BMG Music Club, and the New York Stock Exchange launch their first large-scale Web operations.[15] EarthWeb's successfully executed an initial public offering in November 1998.[17] At the time, EarthWeb's first-day return was among the largest in NASDAQ history and helped recapture dwindling[18] investor interest in new equity offerings from Internet-based companies.[17][19][20]
2000–2009
From 1999–2000, Spivack helped co-found and build nVention Convergence Ventures, an in-house intellectual property incubator of SRI International and Sarnoff Laboratories.[12] While consulting to nVention, Spivack founded two companies of his own: business incubator Lucid Ventures in 2001 and technology venture Radar Networks in 2003. Radar Networks invented technologies based on Semantic Web standards that the company also licensed to CALO, an SRI project funded by DARPA.[21][22] Spivack raised initial outside venture funding for Radar Networks in April 2006.[23]
Radar Networks introduced its first commercial product Twine, a Semantic Web-based tool for information storage, authoring and discovery, in 2008.[24]
In 2009, Spivack became the first investor in Klout.com, a website and mobile app that measures social influence.[25]
In 2015, Spivack co-founded The Arch Mission Foundation. Through the Arch Mission Foundation, Spivack curated the first permanent space library, which contained Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy contained on a quartz disk aboard the Tesla Roadster that was sent to space aboard the SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket in 2018.[29][30][31] In 2019, the Arch Mission sent the Lunar Library, a 30 million page library of books, data, images and a copy of English Wikipedia to the Moon. Spivack says the Arch Mission and Lunar Library were inspired by an early childhood dream of his of the future.[32][33] In 2021, Spivack announced partnerships with Astrobotic Technology and Galactic Legacy Labs for several return missions to the Moon such as a second attempt to deliver the Lunar Library and for consumers to land their personal memories and photos on the Moon.[34][35]
Spivack is also the founder and CEO of Magical Corporation, a science and technology venture studio.[36][37]
Authorship
Spivack is considered a leading pioneer in semantic web technology.[38][39][40] Spivack has authored approximately 100 granted and pending patents.[41][42] He writes about the future of the Internet and topics concerning search, social media, personalization, information filtering, entrepreneurship, and Web technology and applications.[43][44] Spivack has been interviewed by TechCrunch, Live Science, Space.com and other publications regarding the development of data storage for use in space missions and the preservation of earth's civilization.[45]
Personal life
Spivack is the grandson of management theorist Peter F. Drucker.[39] He is married to Kimberly Rubin-Spivack. His parents are poet Kathleen Spivack and inventor Mayer Spivack.[11]
