Rob Reid

By his own account he was born in New York, grew up in Connecticut, attended public schools and studied Arabic and modern Middle Eastern history at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry; after graduating he was a Fulbright Scholar in Cairo and then joined Bain.⁠[1]

He recalls that he entered Harvard Business School hoping one day to become a novelist; in 1992, after an alumna introduced him to a literary agent, he settled on documenting the HBS experience as the subject of his first book.⁠[2]

He went on to earn a Harvard MBA and worked at Salomon Brothers and a VC firm.⁠[3]

In 1994 William Morrow published Year One: An Intimate Look Inside Harvard Business School under the name Robert Reid, a 331-page account of his first year at HBS.⁠[4]

In 1997 he published Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days That Built the Future of Business, a 357-page book telling the stories of early web companies and founders such as Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry and Netscape, Jerry Yang and Yahoo!YahooYahoo is an internet brand that grew out of a 1994 Stanford web directory project created by Jerry Yang and David Filo; its businesses span email, search, news, sports, finance and advertising technology. After acquiring Viaweb in 1998, it launched Yahoo Store. In 2017 the original public company sold its operating business and was renamed Altaba, and the brand’s business came under funds managed by Apollo in 2021. Yahoo’s current chief executive officer is Jim Lanzone, and its official company page lists its headquarters in New York.Open the full entry, and Rob Glaser and RealAudio; reviewers described him as a former Silicon Graphics employee working at the Twenty-First Century Internet venture fund.⁠[5]

He says he conducted more than a hundred long in-person interviews for the book and structured it around eight domains readers needed to grasp the Web’s potential.⁠[6]

He was the solo founder of Listen.com. In February 2000 the San Francisco start-up announced investments from BMG, EMI, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, following Sony Music’s investment the previous October; as founder and CEO he said that having all five major labels as investors positioned Listen.com as the platform for discovering digital music.⁠[7]

In December 2001 Listen.com launched the online music subscription service Rhapsody, beating MusicNet and pressplay to market with monthly catalogue packages for both broadband and dial-up users.⁠[8]

His speaker biography says Listen.com was the first to secure full-catalogue licences from all the major labels and that Rhapsody’s unlimited on-demand model was later adopted by Spotify and Apple.⁠[3]

On April 21, 2003, RealNetworks announced a definitive agreement to acquire Listen.com in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $36 million; under the agreement he, as Listen.com’s founder, was to join RealNetworks as vice president of strategic development.⁠[9]

In March 2012 TED posted “The $8 billion iPod,” his comic short talk lampooning entertainment-industry copyright figures.⁠[3]

On July 10, 2012, his comic science-fiction novel Year Zero was published, the story of an alien civilization that runs up a vast copyright debt through its addiction to American pop music and a young copyright lawyer given 48 hours to save humanity; the book was a New York Times bestseller.⁠[10]

On August 1, 2017, his novel After On was published at 576 pages; Del Rey issued the paperback in June 2018.⁠[11]

He describes the novel, set in a San Francisco social media company that attains consciousness, as also a serious meditation on super-AI risk and the dangers of synthetic biology.⁠[1]

The podcast After On began as a spin-out from the novel.⁠[12]

In April 2019 he spoke at TED2019 on “How synthetic biology could wipe out humanity -- and how we can stop it,” reviewing the risks of a world in which more and more people have access to the tools needed to create a doomsday pathogen and arguing that the danger should be taken seriously.⁠[13]

On April 24, 2021, Sam HarrisSam HarrisSam Harris is an American author, philosopher and neuroscience PhD, host of the Making Sense podcast and founder of the Waking Up meditation app; he rose to prominence with The End of Faith and other critiques of religion and is regarded as a leading figure of the “New Atheism,” and has since written and spoken on morality, free will, meditation and politics, often provoking controversy.Open the full entry’s podcast Making Sense released the nearly four-hour special episode Engineering the Apocalypse, in which he delivered a roughly 100-minute monologue in four segments, interleaved with discussion with Harris, on the danger of a pandemic caused by an artificially modified pathogen and the steps society could take to prevent it.⁠[14]

In June 2021 he appeared on episode 193 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing engineered viruses as a threat to civilization, gain-of-function research, the debate over whether COVID leaked from a lab, virus detection, aliens and superintelligence, as well as the early days of music streaming and startup advice.⁠[15]

He co-founded the venture fund Resilience Reserve with TED head Chris Anderson and serves as its managing director; it backs companies aiming to make the world more resilient, in areas including cleaner and more sustainable food, next-generation energy, pandemic and climate resilience, and energy-efficient AI semiconductors.⁠[16]

On December 18, 2025, Gstaad Capital Corp., a capital pool company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, announced that Resilience Reserve had subscribed for 8.4 million subscription receipts in connection with its proposed merger with the UV-disinfection company Claranova and would hold about 18.33% of the resulting issuer once the transaction closed; Reid said he had followed the public-health potential of UVC and far-UVC light since researching it during the COVID crisis.⁠[17]

He says he now manages only about one After On episode a year, since each scientific interview typically requires 40 to 50 hours of preparation and his main focus is his investing work.⁠[12]

On March 12, 2026, he released episode 62 of After On.⁠[18]

Personal website: Public link: https://foreveron.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

X: Public account: https://x.com/Rob_Reid (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@afteronpodcast7981 (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

Resilience Reserve: Official website: https://www.resilience-reserve.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

RealNetworks: Official website: https://www.realnetworks.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[9]