Chris Anderson’s company, 3DR, helped start the modern drone industry and now focuses on drone data software. He got his start building an open-source aerial robotics community called DIY Drones, and undertook some ill-advised early experiments, such as buzzing Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with one of his self-flying spies. It
may well have been a case of antic gene-expression, since he’s descended from a founder of the American Anarchist movement. Chris ran Wired magazine, a go-to publication for techno-utopians and -dystopians alike, from 2001 to 2012; during his tenure it won five National Magazine Awards.
Chris dislikes the term “roboticist” (“like any properly humbled roboticist, I don’t call myself one”). He began as a physicist. “I turned out to be a bad physicist,” he told me recently. “T struggled on, went to Los Alamos, and thought, ‘Well maybe I’m not going to be a Nobel Prize winner, but I can still be a scientist.’ All of us who were in Physics and had these romantic heroes—the Feynmans, the Manhattan Project—realized that our career trajectory would at best be working on one project at CERN for fifteen years. That project would either be a failure, in which case there would be no paper, or it would be a success, in which case you'd be author #300 on the paper and become an assistant professor at Iowa State.
“Most of my classmates went to Wall Street to become quants, and to them we owe the subprime mortgage. Others went on to start the Internet. First, we built the Internet by connecting physics labs; second, we built the Web; third, we were the first to do Big Data. We had supercomputers—Crays—which were half the power of your phone now, but they were the supercomputers of the time. Meanwhile, we were reading this magazine called Wired, which came out in 1993, and we realized that this tool we scientists use could have applications for everybody. The Internet wasn’t just about scientific data, it was a mind-blowing cultural revolution. So when Conde Nast asked me to take over the magazine, I was like, ‘Absolutely!’ This magazine changed my life.”
He had five children by that time—video-game players—who got him into the “flving robots.” He quit his day job at Wired. The rest is Silicon Valley history.
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