Nova Spivack

Nova Spivack
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Born	(1969-06-05) June 5, 1969 Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author
Partner(s)	Kimberly Rubin
Parent(s)	Mayer Spivack, Kathleen Spivack (Drucker)

Nova Spivack (born June 5, 1969) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He serves as the co-founder and CEO of Bottlenose, a Los Angeles-based company that provides software that discovers emerging trends in high-volume data streams such as social media firehoses; live TV and radio media; and real-time enterprise data such as financial and IT streams. Other companies previously co-founded by Spivack include EarthWeb, Radar Networks, which was acquired by EVRI, The Daily Dot, and Live Matrix, which was acquired by OVGuide in December 2011. Spivack was the first outside investor in Klout, a website and mobile app that measures social influence. Klout was subsequently acquired by Lithium. He is also an investor in other technology startups including Cambrian Genomics, Sensentia, PublishThis, Next IT, and Energy Magnification Corporation.

Spivack is considered a leading pioneer in semantic web technology. He writes about the future of the Internet and topics concerning search, social media, personalization, information filtering, entrepreneurship, and Web technology and applications. He also sits on the board of directors of the Common Crawl Foundation, which provides a free and open search index of the Web.

Biography

Early life, education, and activities

Nova Spivack was born in Boston and grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts. He was admitted early to the University of Massachusetts Boston and attended while still in high school. In 1989, he participated in summer research at MIT and took part in a study of parallel computing techniques for research on chaos- and complexity theory focused on Cellular Automata. He studied philosophy at Oberlin College with focus on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1991. Spivack attended International Space University in 1992. He majored in Space Life Sciences, and also worked on ISU’s space humanities program. His studies at ISU were funded by NASA and the ESA. While at ISU, he also worked in Japan on a project to build an international solar power satellite system. Spivack later trained with the Russian Air Force in reduced-gravity parabolic flight and flew to edge of space with Space Adventures in 1999.

Professional career

In the late 1980s, while a college student, Spivack developed software for Kurzweil Computer Products and later at Thinking Machines. In 1993, Spivack worked at Individual, Inc., a venture that developed intelligent software to filter news sources. Nova Spivack co-founded EarthWeb, a website that provided career development resources and technical information to IT professionals, in 1994. While at EarthWeb, Spivack helped establishments including AT&T, Sony, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BMG Music Club, and the New York Stock Exchange launch their first large-scale Web operations. EarthWeb's successfully executed an initial public offering in November 1998. At the time, EarthWeb's first-day return was among the largest in NASDAQ history and helped recapture dwindling investor interest in new equity offerings from Internet-based companies. EarthWeb’s content business was acquired by Internet.com in 2000. EarthWeb's property Dice.com remained a stand-alone business until it was acquired for approximately US$200 million in 2005, followed by a NASDAQ initial public offering in 2007.

Technological ventures

From 1999-2000, Spivack helped co-found and build nVention Convergence Ventures, an in-house intellectual property incubator of SRI International and Sarnoff Laboratories. While consulting to nVention, Spivack founded two companies of his own: business incubator Lucid Ventures in 2001 and technology venture Radar Networks in 2003. Radar Networks invented technologies based on Semantic Web standards that the company also licensed to CALO, an SRI project funded by DARPA. Spivack raised initial outside venture funding for Radar Networks in April 2006.

Radar Networks introduced its first commercial product Twine, a Semantic Web-based tool for information storage, authoring and discovery, in 2008. In 2009, Spivack became the first investor in Klout.com, a website and mobile app that measures social influence.

Twine was acquired by Evri, a venture backed by Paul Allen, in March 2010. Later in 2010, Spivack and Sanjay Reddy launched Live Matrix, which aimed to provide a unified Web-based guide to all scheduled content and events taking place on the Internet. Live Matrix was acquired by OVGuide in December 2011.

Bottlenose, an enterprise trend intelligence company co-founded by Spivack that analyzes social media and business data to detect trends for brands, launched from stealth mode in April 2011. Spivack co-founded the company in 2010 with Dominiek ter Heide. The Daily Dot, an online newspaper co-founded by Spivack that covers news on internet communities and trends, launched in August 2011. StreamGlider, an app co-founded by Spivack that allows users to important various social media accounts into a single news stream, launched in December of that year.

Personal life

Nova Spivack is the grandson of management theorist Peter F. Drucker. He is married to Kimberly Rubin-Spivack. His parents are poet Kathleen Spivack and inventor Mayer Spivack.