Grateful Dead lyricist. Wyoming cattle rancher. Cyberlibertarian. John Perry Barlow has worn many hats – all wildly visionary, all consummately creative. Next Wednesday (March 11), he will talk about his freewheeling career with an intimate audience of like-minded mavericks as the second installment of the 2015 Google for Entrepreneurs Startup Grind Jackson Hole speaker series at the Amangani Resort. Natalie Spencer, founder of Navvi, will lead the fireside chat and open Q&A; a community dinner with limited availability caps the evening event.
The Jackson conversation with Perry Barlow will likely hit on the high notes of his storied life: his circuitous education from a one-room schoolhouse in Sublette County to the Fountain Valley School in Colorado (where he met Bob Weir, destined for the Grateful Dead) and then Wesleyan University in Connecticut where he graduated with high honors in comparative religion; his many entrepreneurial endeavors from his animal husbandry business in Cora, WY, to his co-founding of Electronic Frontier Foundation and his leadership of Algae Systems, which has commercialized the conversion of microalgae into biofuel; his portfolio as a writer from penning “Mexicali Blues” and “Cassidy” with Weir to authoring “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996 and articles forWIRED and The New York Times; his record of political advocacy and protest voting as a Republican, Democratic, libertarian, and anarchist; and his current involvement as vice-chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s board of directors, as a founding fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and as a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
Jackson attendees will surely walk away inspired by Perry Barlow’s contagious curiosity. Tickets to the March 11event are required and sold in advance through Eventbrite; ticket sales close March 8. Doors open at 6 p.m., the chat begins at 6:30 p.m. and dinner follows at 7:30 p.m.