Kevin Kelly isn’t known for one ‘big thing’, and doesn’t aspire to be. He’s as intelligent, hard-working, ambitious, and prescient as history’s most iconic entrepreneurs—only without any interest in building a unicorn himself. Instead, in his words, he works “Hollywood style”—in a series of creative projects. What follows is a sampling of his life’s work.
Kelly was an editor for the Whole Earth Catalog in the early 1980s, helped start WELL, one of the first online communities, in 1985, and co-founded WIRED magazine in 1993. He’s written a dozen books and published hundreds of essays on topics from art to optimism, travel, religion, creativity, and AI (even before it was a thing). Kelly rode a bicycle across the United States in his 20s. He was Steven Spielberg’s ‘futurist advisor’ on Minority Report, and the inspiration behind the famous ‘Death Clock’ on Futurama, after the show’s creator Matt Groening caught wind of the Life Countdown Clock Kelly keeps on his computer desktop. He organizes tightly curated group walks across Asia and Europe, regularly covering ~100km in a week. He sculpts, draws, paints, and photographs. And he’s a longtime friend and collaborator of Stewart Brand (whose famous line, “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” Steve Jobs quoted in his iconic commencement address at Stanford).
To encourage long-term thinking, Kelly is helping build a clock into a mountain in western Texas that will tick for 10,000 years. Brian Eno and Jeff Bezos are active collaborators. He’s a born-again Christian. He’s been married to his wife, Gia-Miin, for 38 years, and they have three children together. He was pivotal to a fringe-turned-mainstream movement to identify and catalog every living species on earth (now owned and operated by Smithsonian). He was early to think and write about the quantified self, which gave rise to products like Fitbit, Strava, Apple Watch, Eight Sleep, and the Oura Ring. Kelly’s idea of “1,000 true fans” practically christened the creator economy with his 2008 insight that “if 1,000 people will pay you $100 per year, you can gross $100k—more than enough to live on for most.”
The people who become legendary in their interests never feel they have arrived. Kevin Kelly
Naval Ravikant has called him a “modern-day Socrates,” Marc Andreessen has said that “everything Kevin Kelly writes is worth reading,” Eno called him “one of the most consistently provocative thinkers about technology and culture,” and Ray Kurzweil said that “Kevin Kelly understands the direction of technology better than almost anyone I know.”
Kelly’s Hollywood style of working has always resonated with me; it’s the way I aspire to work and largely have since starting my career. Yet now, 15 years in, I’ve become self-conscious about it. Working in Silicon Valley will convince you that starting a company with its sights on unicorn status is the only possible way to make an impact, and the only work worthy of an ambitious individual.
Kelly is a cheerful and enterprising repudiation of that path, and I didn’t get very long into my interview preparations to realize that I wasn’t only writing about a personal hero; I was seeking a way to make peace with my own professional choices. After a day together, I realized that my pilgrimage to meet the man in his element might also grant permission to others in our line of work who are interested in charting a different course to impact.
I started my career at Google selling AdWords to small businesses, and finished my first quarter as the number three seller in North America. Professional opportunities immediately unfolded—early nods for management, trips to global offices to present my “best practices,” my face on slides next to impressive metrics, and attention from more senior leaders.
It’s hard to say why none of that seemed very interesting, but it didn’t. What I did like was starting a campaign to rename the conference rooms and helping my coworker launch his internal content series, G-Chat with Charleton, in which he would interview Google executives while sitting with them in a two-person snuggie. I had earned myself a ticket to the fast career track at one of the coolest companies in Silicon Valley, but climbing the corporate ladder just wasn’t for me.
So I spent the next 10 years chasing what seemed most fun. After 14 months at Google, my work bestie, Jenny, and I left Google together to give the startup thing a try. We went to a mobile gaming company where I learned to make my way around spreadsheets, play Magic: The Gathering, and cash in on a blockbuster ‘pet hotel’ game. Eighteen months later, it was a six-person startup that was known as “the black sheep of Y Combinator.” In my free time, I coached a JV high school soccer team, volunteered at Dandelion Chocolate (all that working on software made me want to make something with my hands), and finished writing a novel.
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