Marc Porat is a rare strategic force—a visionary and practitioner, a thought leader on the future of AI and agentic systems and their impact on businesses and society. His company, General Magic, is credited with inventing the smartphone and the first agent platform.
Marc brings clarity, energy, context, leadership, and depth of execution to Strategy Committees, Senior Advisory roles, and Boards. He is a thoughtful listener, a compelling speaker, and a trusted advisor—effective in the boardroom, public forums, and internal offsites—helping leadership teams understand and navigate the design of a defensible competitive advantage with a world-class AI-first strategic plan.
He is a though-leader on Superintelligence – the most powerful technology in human experience. It will change everything. It can unlock immense human and economic benefits, and it can create deep problems. It spans the continuum from utopian to dystopian. Marc’s keynotes are rated by audiences and organizers as powerful, thought-provoking, and “amazing”.
Marc’s key message to companies navigating the rapidly evolving AI discontinuity is to transform their business model and operations – with AI as a core competence – and harness its benefits; or risk dramatic and possibly irreversible decline.
- How AI, agentics, AGI evolving to Superintelligence will reshape industries, markets, and the nature of work.
- How to align leadership, culture, and technology to drive innovation during this revolutionary period of discontinuity.
Marc was the founding CEO of General Magic, the iconic Apple spinout credited with creating the first smartphone and Telescript, an intelligent agent platform, laying the groundwork for today’s agentic AI revolution. Key team members went on to build the iPhone, Android, and eBay. (See the award-winning “General Magic the Movie”).
Marc is an advisor to private equity firms and companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100. He invested early in VC funds and in companies such as Google, Sendmail, Dropbox, and Rescale, and is broadly connected to the Silicon Valley venture capital community.
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As a leader, Board member, and operator, Marc has served as CEO, Chairman, and Director of six companies: Private Satellite Network, Serious Materials, CalStar Cement, Zeta, and Perfect Commerce. He holds senior Board of Advisor roles with SandboxAQ, focusing on AI for cybersecurity, pharma, and materials discovery; and with Delos, focusing on AI for commercial real estate and health.
Marc is a Stanford University-trained economist. His doctoral dissertation, The Information Economy, is widely cited as the definitive macroeconomic work on how knowledge workers and information industries drive economic growth and wealth. He lives and works in San Francisco.