Barney In Full Spring

Barney is a California native who I recently connected with in London while he toured Europe with his wife and family. 

I met Barney in Maida Value,  W9, the neighbourhood of our second flat, in 1999. Barney had completed his B.S. at Stanford (Symbolic Systems) and Ph.D. at Cambridge in computer science and AI. 

And what does one do with such credentials ?  Work at NASA, of course, where he was the Software Architect on the Remote Agent, the first s/w agent to fly onboard a deep space probe during NASA's Deep Space One Mission, and widely considered one of the top achievements in the history of AI  and awarded NASA's "software of the year" in 1999. 

From there, Barney founded PowerSet, a neural networking application, backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and sold to Microsoft becoming Microsoft Bing. A fellow has to make some money in his 20s, afterall.

Barney has gone on to found and fund over 200 AI-related start-ups in SV.  We frequently see each other, and I am always refreshed by his ideas. Back in the day we agreed to form a venture firm together but that would have required my relocating to the Bay Area, which Sonnet and I were not ready to do then.