25 years, Chris Anderson is the maestro of humor, wisdom and, sometimes, sticky blather who is ted. Because he took over the reins of the small but influential annual conference of “technology, entertainment and design” in 2000, he built it in a reputable, if sometimes mocked, conglomerate of “ideas that are worth sharing” with a Heavily affected YouTube channel, thousands of locally licensed meetings called TEDX, and an archive of more than a quarter of a million conversations, including those of Elon Musk, Monica Lewinsky and of course Bono. There are TED Podcasts, a TED radio show on NPR and an educational program called TED-OD.
Now he wants to give it all away.
Today he announces his intention to resign from the non -profit and to transfer the entire Kaboodle to the person who shares the best idea of what he should do with it. “It seems like an idea of Bonkers, except everything that has ever happened to Ted since I have supervised it happened when we let go,” he told me, only speaking against Wired. “We have given away the content, and that made Ted Viral. We have given the brand away in the form of TEDX licenses. If you check someone else something, you give him the motivation to do their best. There are amazing things that TED can do in the next chapter. And so I think it's time to try the same again. Let go and be amazed. “
Anderson says he has not burned out. But 25 years is a long time. He will not earn money from the transaction – he is rich, by running technical publications in the 80s and 90s – and he never took a salary at TED. Despite a perception that Ted is beyond his prime, he says that the organization is in good condition. While membership fell during the Pandemie, the company's finances have now been restored. The most recent financial archiving reports a break-even balance of around $ 100 million, and Anderson says that TED has $ 25 million in cash reserves. He adds that seats (most sold for $ 12,500 per doll) for the following week -long conference, in the customized 1500 sitting place theater in Vancouver, British Columbia, are sold out, as always. Sam Altman will be in the building!
Do you want it? Check your bank account. Anderson wants someone to bring TED to a new level with the money. Who could be that? An unfortunate standard can be a superbillionary who prefers to hear from Mariene's preservators, evolutionary anthropologists and “worldwide souls”-all speakers on TED 2025-in place to hang around in Mar-a-Lago. Instead, Anderson presents a university, one of the great philanthropic organizations, a large media outlet, a city that is looking for a cerebral version of the Fringe Festival, or even a Big Tech or AI company. (Imagine how former speakers will welcome their conversations used to train the next version of Gemini or Copilot.) He muses that a collective decentralized autonomous organization-a blockchain-organized group of many TED-Sters-the current community maintains maintenance . That idea seems far-fetched, but that also applies to some conversations that you may find on the red circle of the TED stage. Surprise him.
“There is an opportunity to bring knowledge wide and side, but we can't do that with our current means,” he says. “I just want to open the tent and see who can bring in their own version of that vision and the sources to really make it. And part of me just likes the kind of playful surprising side. I really don't know what will happen. “
Ted-star will not, and that will certainly cause some fear. I have been on and off at TED conferences since the 1990s, when an eccentric architect named Richard Saul Wurman led the event in a small theater in Monterey, California. As a first TED participant, Anderson was so charmed that he bought the franchise and extended his audience from 550 people in a theater to millions, making the term “ted talk” in a cliché, for better or worse. When I was present, I wrote a 'State of Ted' shipping that Anderson usually records a good humor, except for the time in 2009 when I criticized him because he was not much satisfied with the economic crisis. (He responded to the podium.) It will be strange at Ted without him, but then it would be stranger for him to continue forever.
