Ramez Naam is the founder and Managing Partner of Planetary VC, which invests in startups addressing the world’s greatest challenges. He’s a computer scientist, startup investor, energy futurist, and the award-winning author of five books.

Ramez is a founding faculty member and the former Co-Chair for Energy and Environment at Singularity University. He speaks around the world on innovation, exponential technology, and disruptive energy technologies.

Ramez’s seminal 2011 Scientific American article, “Smaller, Cheaper, Faster” observed that the price of solar power was dropping exponentially and would eventually be lower than that of any other energy source. He’s since detailed the exponential trends in wind power, energy storage, and electric vehicles.

In addition to his energy analysis, through his firm Planetary VC, Ramez is an investor in numerous startups in the fields of energy, sustainability, and AI; and an advisor to multiple fortune 500 energy and transportation companies.

Before turning to energy, Ramez spent 13 years at Microsoft where he led teams working on efforts in email, web browsing, cloud computing, search, and AI. He holds more than 20 patents in the fields of information retrieval and machine learning, several of them co-authored with Bill Gates.

Ramez’s work has appeared in or been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic, Slate, Business Week, Discover, Wired, and Scientific American. He's spoken to corporate, government, and non-profit audiences on 6 continents around the world. You can see some of his talks here.

Follow Ramez on twitter: @ramez or visit him at http://rameznaam.com