Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson spent 25 years turning ideas into the world’s most-watched talks as the curator of TED, the nonprofit media organization behind the “ideas worth spreading” mantra. Under his stewardship, TED released more than 4,000 talks and animated lessons free online, viewed billions of times, and he authored the books TED Talks and Infectious Generosity.
Chris was born in 1957 in a remote village in Pakistan, where his parents worked as medical missionaries, and spent his early years in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan before studying philosophy at Oxford University. He trained as a journalist, then turned entrepreneur, founding Future Publishing in 1985 with a $25,000 bank loan and building it into an international media company with more than 130 magazines.
In 2001, his nonprofit foundation acquired the TED Conference, and Chris left publishing to run TED full-time.
At TED, he launched TEDx, TED-Ed, TED Fellows, and The Audacious Project, a new form of collaborative philanthropy that has directed more than $4 billion toward bold, high-impact solutions to global problems. Chris has retained his Chairman’s role at TED, while now devoting the majority of his time to climate innovation as an investor and convener.
Chris has built one of the most distinctive personal clean-tech investment portfolios, primarily through three funds: Exa Ventures, Resilience Reserve, and Ocean Zero. In 2025, he launched the All Aboard Fund, designed to co-invest alongside the world’s top climate VCs as means to address climate’s notorious ‘missing middle’ problem.
He is a founding partner of Countdown, a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, and continues to convene the people he believes need to be in the same room, bringing the same instinct that built TED to bear on the problems he now considers most urgent.