Andrew Keen
Referent
Andrew Keen, born in Hampstead (London) in 1960, studied at London University where he was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in Modern History, as a British Council Fellow at the University of Sarajevo and at the University of California at Berkeley where he earned a Master’s Degree in Political Science.
He is the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today's User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values (2007), and is widely regarded as the leading contemporary critic of the Internet. The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote that “every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen”.
In the mid-nineties, Andrew Keen was a member of the pioneering generation of Silicon Valley visionaries who first ‘got’ the Internet. He founded Audiocafe.com in 1995, and, securing significant investment from Intel and SAP, established it as one of the most highly trafficked websites of the late nineties. He spoke regularly on the digital media circuit and was featured and quoted in many newspapers and magazines including Esquire, The Industry Standard, Business Week, Wired, The Wall Street Journal and The London Guardian.
In 2000, he produced MB5: The Festival for New Media Visionaries, a futurist show featuring some of Silicon Valley’s leading pundits. Since then, he has held senior management positions at a number of venture capital backed start-ups including Pulse, Santa Cruz Networks and Pure Depth. He is currently the Founder and Chief Executive of afterTV LLC, a firm that helps marketers optimise their brand desirability in the post-TV consumer landscape.
Andrew Keen writes a syndicated column for the UK’s Independent, as well as for the leading Dutch paper Volkskrant and the Belgium daily De Standaard. He has written for many other publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The London Guardian, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, Prospect, Fast Company and Entertainment Weekly.