Instructor Bio

I graduated from Grinnell College in 1976, with a degree in Religious Studies and English, and extensive coursework in Classics as well.   So what does that prepare someone for?   More graduate school?   A professorship?   A clergy position?

Sure.   But that’s not what happened.

I spent the first half of the 1980’s as a book editor, editing everything from romance novels to non-fiction books about information theory.  My boss and I were asked to start an Electronic Publishing Division — producing both computer books and early consumer software — and I discovered computer games as a result, back in an era when it was hardly an industry and the internet did not exist except at a few universities and government sites.  But something lit up inside me and I knew what I wanted to do:  produce deep, rich computer games, and do them online (even if nobody was really online!). As you might imagine, New York City was not the center of the computer games universe.

But somehow, from 1985-1992 I got recruited to run the games and education division at a large consumer online start-up owned by IBM, CBS, and Sears, called Prodigy.   I became a leader there because I was enthusiastic about something nobody else was, could be persuasive about its value, and developed a very wide range of connections in the fledgling game industry.  And yes, the games I produced were very popular. I was able to produce the first online game to reach one million users — before 1990, when nobody was really online! — and two of those games are still online today.

But despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and what was then its leadership position in online services, Prodigy itself was doomed, and many of us knew it.  The irony of that is that many of the technologies and business models that power the modern Internet were actually invented by us during those years.   So my time there came to an end, and after a few years of consulting, I joined Scholastic as an executive overseeing their digital efforts.  It was interesting, but not interesting enough, and so, when some friends of mine called me to ask for my help over at Sony, I jumped!   Sony Online Entertainment was — like Prodigy — a very large corporate start-up with big ambitions.  I was the executive in charge of product, creative, and technology.  And from 1997-1999 we had a blast.  One of those games — Everquest — basically created the genre known as Massively Multiplayer Online Games, and while it’s not owned by Sony anymore, it’s still being played by thousands of people.

After a brief, dreary stint at the once-powerful media conglomerate Viacom I had the opportunity to take some time off.   It was September 2001, and I lived two blocks from the World Trade Center.  I was there that morning.  I’m glad you weren’t.

Events like 9/11 have a way of re-orienting one’s perspective, and suddenly, working in the entertainment industry — even the game industry — just seemed insufficiently motivating. I didn’t want to leave it really, but I wanted something more.   And then, in February 2002, completely out of the blue, I got a phone call from someone claiming to be a Colonel in the United States Air Force, asking me if I’d like to participate in a six-month research study for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency about the implications of online games for national security I said, sure, why not!  This individual, Jack Thorpe became a significant mentor to me in years since.  He is arguably the person who not just envisioned, but created early versions of what we would now call the Metaverse, but he turned me on to ComicCon as well.   He was far more entrepreneurial than pretty much any start-up guy I’ve met since, and did it while navigating an institution that is highly resistant to rapid change.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era, so for me, the US military had nothing but negative connotations.  But I had said yes to Jack, and several months into the study, which involved academics, industry folks like myself, retired generals, and special operations officers just back from Afghanistan, I realized my view was not just simplistic, but wrong. I also felt that it was far more interesting to think about how games could play a role in learning, training, and researching than just leveling up my half-elf Druid…not that there’s anything wrong with that!

So I had this idea:  why not start a games company focused on serious games?   In particular, I felt that online technology had matured to the point where one could create an online games platform from which you could build specific applications (or games, if you will.).  I had a choice:  join a company that I felt had the tech to do what I wanted or start a company from scratch.   As luck would have it, a bunch of people I knew from the game industry had a secretive start-up in the Bay Area to create a kind of freeform metaverse, basically a game with no gameplay.  I flew out there, told the CEO my vision, and convinced him to bring me on as “VP of Special Projects” to explore non-consumer opportunities.

Two years later in 2004, the company — which had raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital — was in deep trouble.   A neighbor of mine in NY ran an international venture capital fund, and had become interested in digital media.  To be clear, I knew absolutely nothing about venture capital.  And this vc didn’t really know much about games.  But we liked each other and so in short order his fund stepped in to save the company, with the condition that I become CEO.

It was a painful process to restructure the company and I was learning on the job.  Lots of brilliant people left, and today many of them are very highly regarded technologists and tech investors.  But we picked up the pieces and little by little rebuilt the company in line with my idea.  We began to pick up momentum, but it was not easy.  We brought in new investors too, and started to generate revenue and reputation.

And then the recession of 2008 hit, along with a few other events, and we had to sell the company for a fraction of what had been invested.   We actually did better than almost every other company at the time:  most just folded.  But it was crushing.  We were sooooo close to huge success, and even the small amounts of capital we needed to get over the hump were not available to us at that time.

So what was next?  I had to do something:  As I told I friend, I had gotten a .jpeg of a yacht, not an actual yacht, out of the sale process.  But then a colleague asked if I’d step in as interim CEO of an interesting  AI/computer vision company called Image Metrics.  Just do it for three months, he told me, and then he’d he’d take over.  For various reasons, that seemed perfect to me.   But it ended up being three years, not three months.  Once again, I had to completely restructure the company and, because the company was publicly traded, I had to find ways to deal with the overwhelming problems that came with being public.  But somehow, it got done, and after three years, my interim gig was over!

That idea that games had “serious” uses was something I still firmly believed in, so when, in 2012 I was asked to join the board of the non-profit Institute of Play I jumped at the chance.  I had no plan to become Executive Director in 2013, but when the founder left, everyone looked at me.  I learned a lot.  Some of it was good, some of it, well, not so much.  And yet again, I had to do a lot of restructuring to keep the place from collapsing.  Being a turnaround CEO was definitely not something in my career plan, but it seemed to follow me wherever I went.

So in 2015 I told the board (which I still served on), that I was done.  And I decided to take three months to answer the following questions:

What was I good at? 

What wasn’t I good at?

What did I like to do? 

What didn’t I like to do?

As you might imagine, my goal was to find the intersection of “What am I good at?” + “What do I like to do?”   and with that answer in hand embark on something new.

I don’t think I ever quite answered the question in the way I imagined answering it.  Instead, I started advising all sorts of very early stage start-ups, doing a fair amount of consulting, and meeting quite a few people doing things more interesting than I ever imagined.  In some ways that’s what I’m still doing, with two important additions:

• First, around this same time, I became re-engaged with Grinnell, something that I had not really done since graduation.   I was invited to join the Alumni Council, which I did, I was encouraged to run for President of the Council, which I did, and I became a frequent speaker for the Wilson Center’s “Learning From Alumni” series.  This year I joined the Center’s Advisory Council.
• Second, one of my friends from the earliest days of the game industry asked me if I’d help write a book about climate.  Neither he nor I were experts (he’s a well-known best-selling book author about business-related topics), but by the fall of 2021 we had a book contract to deliver The Carbon Almanac, and he and I and 300 other people from around the world somehow managed to deliver a 300-page illustrated, fully-researched bestselling book on climate in five months.  It was published by Viking Penguin in July of 2022.

Understanding the criticality of the climate crisis has changed everything for me.  This crisis is not really about science or technology:  those are kind of the easy hard problems.  The hard problem is the question of why, even when we as individuals and collectively as a society know better, we still don’t act to ensure there’s a future for ourselves, and especially for you and everyone who should come after you.

The hard problem is the mystery of the human heart.  And that’s why those philosophy and religious studies and history and literature and sociology and anthropology degrees are so essential today, even for solving our greenhouse gas emissions problems and all the others as well.

To some degree, this question of why we don’t act in ways that advance human well-being, even when we know what to do, is what has led me to create this course.  There are several reasons for that:

• No one person can solve crises as large as climate, and exploring solutions also opens up answers to all the other challenges — poverty, injustice, conflict, disease, cruelty, and hatred — that humanity still hasn’t fundamentally solved.
• What sorts of organizations can solve these problems?   The fact is, it will take effort from every sector:   governments, NGOs and other civic groups…and the business world.   Each has its own positives and negatives.  The business world tends to be particularly maligned with regard to its potential to address problems, but without a healthy business sector we will never have the kinds of innovations and resources we need for the other sectors to play their parts.  The business world needs people like you to play important roles.
• The amazing power of technology (of all sorts) to empower small groups of people opens up the potential for entrepreneurship in a variety of contexts.  That means that each of you can have far more impact than you might ever have imagined.

Today, I spend my time on several long-term projects.  One of them is an outgrowth of The Carbon Almanac, called The Atlas of Democracies.  The Atlas is a multi-dimensional initiative — conferences, agentic sandboxes, and digital publishing — to nurture worldwide innovations in democratic practice in order to build and rebuild healthier societies.   Another is The Highlands Forum, a 30-year old organization that holds small convenings of a diverse set of talented individuals to explore a very wide range of topics that affect the future of governance and security.   And in addition to the privilege of teaching this course, I have served on Grinnell’s Alumni Council, continue to serve on the Wilson Center’s advsiry board, and in general, retain a strong interest in the future of the college, but especially, the future of all of us.

 

 

Robert Gehorsam
Los Angeles
July 2026