Apprentices? Interns? Assistants? No. They Are... Strikeforce

Futurist Peter Diamandis offers a deal to young, bright entrepreneurs: Help him for two years, and maybe build the next billion-dollar company at the same time. Inside Silicon Valley’s most curious residency.

- Andrew Leonard

As robots go, the three telepresence machines that wheeled themselves into a conference room in Culver City, Calif., in mid May were not exactly what one would call lifelike. Flatscreens mounted on stilts rising from a mobile base, operated from afar by flesh-and-blood humans sitting in front of keyboards, the robots were functionally little more than sophisticated teleconferencing gear. Some people Skype into business meetings, but that’s not forward-thinking enough for Peter Diamandis. So when he gathers the dozen or so employees of his company PHD Ventures for their monthly meetings, the off-site participants send robot stand-ins.

“All right, you rebels!” says Diamandis, after the attendees are all in place. “Let’s go!” He calls this assemblage his Jedi Council; he is Obi-Wan, and they are his disciples.

Nobody blinks an eye at any of this. Rubbing elbows with robots is hardly the most fast-forward aspect of existence in the “Peter-verse.” The job, after all, of the mostly 20-something millennials assembled in this room (or beaming in from New Jersey or Seattle) is to translate Diamandis’ futurism into revenue-producing businesses.

Diamandis is a serial entrepreneur, an author, and a public speaker who has started companies dedicated to commercial asteroid mining, zero- gravity flight, and the extension of human longevity, not to mention the XPrize Foundation (which describes itself as “an innovation engine [and] a facilitator of exponential change”) and Silicon Valley’s way-beyond-the-bleeding-edge Singularity University (more on that later). In other words, Peter Diamandis lives in the future. A future he is 100 percent confident will be great. Bring on the robots!