Mr. Johnson was getting his MBA at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business when he launched credit card software company Braintree, which sold last year to eBay Inc. for $800 million. Although he stepped down as CEO in 2011, Mr. Johnson still owned part of the company.
Today, Johnson wants to use OS-level thinking to redefine medical discovery and cure aging; recreate the biological toolset of our existence; become a multi-planetary species; reinvent global transportation infrastructure; enhance our minds; safely create advanced machine intelligence; and produce abundant clean energy.
The OS Fund finances and supports inventors and scientists who are working on audacious breakthroughs to solve the greatest issues and opportunities facing mankind today. Our mission is to partner with tech pioneers who aim to improve the lives of billions of people around the world for generations to come.
In the same way that computers have operating systems at their core — dictating the way a computer works and serving as a foundation upon which all applications are built — everything in life has an operating system (OS).
Never in the history of mankind has the gap between imagination and creation been so narrow. With our new and powerful tools of creation including 3D printing, genomics, machine intelligence, software, synthetic biology, and others, we can now create the kind of world we could previously only dream of. Where da Vinci could sketch, today we can build.
— Bryan Johnson Founder
The OS Fund was officially launched in late 2014 but its roots began even earlier. In September 2013 Bryan Johnson had just closed the sale of his company, Braintree, to eBay/PayPal. Fuelled by a promise he made to himself more than a decade earlier, he set off on a quest to find and support bright minds working toward creating a better world. A few weeks later, he met Dr. Craig Venter, the scientist who first sequenced the human genome and created the world’s first synthetic genome. Bryan became the first large investor in Venter’s Human Longevity, Inc.
In the following months, Bryan met and invested in other visionary scientists and entrepreneurs working on some of humanity’s greatest opportunities, including Scott Phoenix of Vicarious; Andreas Raptopoulos of Matternet; and Eric Anderson, Peter Diamandis and Chris Lewicki of Planetary Resources. As Bryan began working with these like-minded entrepreneurs, an investment thesis began to form. He decided to dedicate $100 million of his personal capital to support those pursuing quantum-leap breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. Shortly after, the OS Fund was born.
SOURCES – OSfund, Chicago Business
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.