Barney Pell

Summary

I'm an active start-up enterpreneur, investor and advisor with over 200 investments. I enjoy helping bring advanced technology and big ideas into real applications and markets that change people's lives. I'm currently Chief Scientist and Head of AI for Magic, the leading virtual assistant company; Venture Partner at Radical Ventures; and an Industry Advisor for EQT, one of the top Private Equity firms in the world. I am a Fellow in the Creative Destruction Laboratory, one of the world's top start-up accelerators, an angel investor and VC with my own fund and syndicate, World Changing Ventures. I have been active in startup companies as founder, executive and advisory roles for over 30 years. I was Founder and CEO of Powerset, a natural language search engine that Microsoft acquired. I then stayed on with Microsoft as search strategist and evangelist for Bing, Microsoft's new consumer search engine, and later as architect and general manager for Bing's Local/Mobile Search team. While at Microsoft, I led the company's long-range planning for semantics and knowledge and co-founded Bing's Knowledge Graph and Cortana, Microsoft's conversational assistant. Before starting Powerset, I was at Mayfield VC as an Entrepreneur in Residence. I was also co-founder of Moon Express, a start-up developing a commercial lunar lander; LocoMobi, a leader in smart cities and intelligent transportation systems, and Associate Founder of Singularity University. I was a founding investor and then Chairman of the Science Advisory Board for Figure Eight, a leader in human-in-the-loop machine learning, until successful acquisition by Appen; a founding investor and key advisor for Streamlit from inception until acquisition by Snowflake, and an early advisor to LinkedIn. Earlier startups included StockMaster.com, a leading online financial content provider and Whizbang! Labs, a leading innovator of web-based information extraction agents. I have also been a long-time AI research leader. I managed an 85-person AI R&D organization at NASA. Highlights included flying the first Agent AI system in space (on the Deep Space One mission), the first spoken dialog system in space, and supporting the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. I worked on NLP at SRI while an undergrad at Stanford, and my PhD work pioneered the field of General Game Playing in AI.