Gabriel Ramsey

I grew up in small towns in the Ozarks, central Missouri and West Virginia. I watched people struggle. I saw how the global economy doesn’t necessarily deal everyone in. I watched how people organized themselves locally in ways that were very valuable, but often intentionally isolating. In high school I sang second tenor in an a cappella quartet that played paid gigs across mid-Missouri. Like many kids in the vast interior, I wanted to see the world! At eighteen I left for Massachusetts.

At University of Massachusetts, Amherst I studied cultural anthropology, with a focus on Eastern Europe after the Soviet era. I learned Russian and Hungarian, spent a year at the University of Pécs, excavated a Pocumtuck village archaeological site in the Connecticut River valley, and spent a season observing how orangutans comfort one another. I have been an anthropologist at heart ever since.

I landed in Northern California in 1996, during the heart of the dot-com boom. I learned how the technology industry works from the ground up. I tested video games and desktop publishing tools, then worked as a product manager getting products out the door on time. It was my first lesson in how things break, and in how much of building anything is translation between people who think differently.

I went to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, where I edited the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and then spent about twenty-four years as a litigator and strategic counselor in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, as a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and later at Crowell & Moring. I worked for and against some of the most consequential companies in technology, entertainment and media, frequently on problems where the law had not yet caught up with the technology. I worked on Oracle v. Google, the long-running dispute over whether software interfaces can be copyrighted. I spent years alongside Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, the FBI and international partners using civil courts to dismantle botnets and other criminal infrastructure. I was involved in one of the earliest cases about using copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence. I advised video game studios, film and television companies, chipmakers, platforms and startups, and I spent a lot of time in Washington and Brussels on technology policy.

I also helped run things: practices, recruiting efforts, innovation programs and committees, with real responsibility for people and for the bottom line. I no longer practice law. What I kept is a habit of reverse engineering, of asking how a plan will fail before it does, and a deep respect for the people on the other side of the table.

It has always been important to me to find animating energies through acts of creation and giving. I have tried to place myself in contexts where I can learn through both. For more than fifteen years I served as an agent, supporter and board member of a nonprofit string quartet, through its final season. For a similar stretch, I helped the avant-garde jazz vocalist Patty Waters with her recordings, royalties and return to the stage. And I spent two decades maintaining a handbook that helps immigrant entrepreneurs start businesses.

I remain what I have always been: an anthropologist, a builder, a strategist, and a student of conflict. Right now I am building more than at any point in my life, with several new ventures underway that bring everything I have done into one place. I advise founders and leaders on their hardest problems, and the work keeps leading back to the same question: how people create value together, and what they owe one another. I seek out arts and tech communities around the world, lend a hand where I can, and keep learning. And I am writing a long essay about small rooms: places where art is made and peace is found, and which are sometimes the main character in the story.