Dr. Nathan P. Myhrvold

Dr. Nathan P. Myhrvold is the former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and is the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, which is building a large patent portfolio. He was a precocious student who began college at age 14, and studied mathematics, geophysics, and space physics at UCLA. Myhrvold earned a master's degree in mathematical economics at Princeton, and completed a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics at age 23. Meantime, he taught himself programming and began tinkering with computers. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge University working under Professor Stephen Hawking, studying cosmology and quantum field theory. Myhrvold took a leave of absence from Cambridge, and with $10,000 from savings and friends, he moved to Berkeley to start a software company with his brother. In 1986, Microsoft acquired his venture for more than a $1 billion, and three years later, he was selected as their chief "technologist." Dr. Myhrvold worked at Microsoft for 14 years, and founded Microsoft Research in 1991 where he guided the company into the multimedia future, and became one of the most influential leaders in American technology. After Microsoft, he co-founded Intellectual Ventures in 2000, a patent portfolio developer and broker that has acquired over 30,000 patents in the areas of technology and energy. He recently published a cookbook that surveyed the science, technology and techniques used in modern cuisine, "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking." Dr. Nathan Myhrvold participated in the 1999 Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. and spoke to the student delegates about risk-taking, serendipity, his journey as an entrepreneur, and his belief that "life is an adventure."