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Peter Barrett could Known today as the co-founder and CTO of Playground Global. However, his experience in the technology world goes back to his youth.
Barrett's first security program caught the NSA's attention when he was only 19 years old. His career has been an adventure ever since, starting with his first company, Rocket Science Games. Barrett built an IPTV platform for Microsoft, CloudCar Cloud Intelligence for the automotive industry and now for Playground quantum and optical computing, robotics and artificial intelligence. Barrett also holds more than 100 patents.
Despite all of the technological advances the industry has made over the past three decades, Barrett believes that the computer revolution has not yet begun – hence his interest in startups, particularly in robotics, automation, and AI. Playground, with $ 825 million in assets under management and 39 active portfolio companies, has made more than 20 investments in robotics and automation. The five-year-old company has recorded at least 10 exits, including Canvas Technology for Amazon, DeepScale for Tesla, Zippy for Cruise, Lighthouse for Apple and Nervana, which were acquired by Intel.
Barrett is also a board member of PsiQuantum, Fathom, Lacuna, Anjuna, Artificial, Next Silicon and NVision and is a Virta observer. Despite all of these investor activities, Barrett still finds time to program every day. Maybe it's because Barrett thinks code is the new concrete that will essentially become the foundation of tomorrow's infrastructure. Coding is also fun.
These are just a few of the reasons why we are pleased that Barrett is coming to us at 11 a.m. [PT / 2 p.m.]. ET July 28th as part of our Extra Crunch Live series, which connects some of the best and brightest minds in technology with our Extra Crunch audience. We had a stacked agenda of speakers that included Mark Cuban, Aileen Lee and Ted Wang, Aaron Levie from Box, Julia Hartz from Eventbrite, and Hans Tung and Jeff Richards from GGV Capital.
Barrett will sit down with us virtually to discuss a variety of topics, from the future of computing to life sciences and automation to the misunderstanding of robotics Potential for automation beyond humanoid robots and whether quantum computers are ready for the spotlight.
We'll also talk today about COVID-19 and how it affects its portfolio companies, the challenges of remotely investing in entrepreneurs, and how venture capitalists are tracking the wrong types of companies and not prioritizing real progress.
In short, we plan to talk a lot and you don't want to miss it.
