Brad Templeton

Why organisations work with Brad Templeton

• He has sat inside the Google self-driving car program as a strategy and technology consultant since 2010, giving him a read on the robotaxi industry that armchair analysts cannot match.
• He holds 21 patents across self-driving cars and telephony, so claims about what is technically possible come from someone who has actually built in the space.
• As founder of ClariNet in 1989, the first company built to do commercial business on the internet, he has a forty-year pattern of calling commercial shifts before the market sees them.
• Twenty years on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including a decade as Chairman, means he speaks credibly on the privacy, surveillance and civil-liberties consequences of AI and autonomy.
• He is a founding faculty member and Chair for Computing and Networks at Singularity University, where the brief is to frame exponential technology change for senior decision-makers.

Biography highlights

• Founder and CEO of ClariNet Communications (1989), the first company established to conduct commercial activity over the internet.
• Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chairman from 2000 to 2010, board member since 1997.
• Founding faculty and Chair for Computing and Networks at Singularity University since 2009.
• Strategy and technology consultant on the Google self-driving car project, now Waymo, since 2010.
• Inventor on 21 patents in autonomous vehicles and telephony.
• Forbes contributor on robocars; publisher of Robocars.com and the long-running Brad Ideas blog.
• Board member of the Foresight Institute; plaintiff in Reno v. ACLU.

Biography

ClariNet went live in June 1989 and sold the first commercial subscription on the internet to Stanford University. The founder was Brad Templeton. That single contract is the practical birth of the dot-com economy, and it sets the pattern for the rest of his career: spotting the commercial shape of a technology before the market has language for it.

Two decades later the same instinct took him into Google’s self-driving car program. Since 2010 he has consulted on strategy and technology for what is now Waymo, while also writing a reference column on the industry for Forbes and at Robocars.com. His 21 patents in autonomous vehicles and telephony make the commentary load-bearing; he is not narrating the robotaxi race from the outside.

Alongside the commercial work, Templeton spent twenty years on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a decade of that as Chairman, and was a named plaintiff in Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court case that struck down the Communications Decency Act. That record is why boards bring him in when the question shifts from “does the AI work” to “what fights over privacy, surveillance and liability will shape who gets to deploy it.”

At Singularity University, where he has been Chair for Computing and Networks since the founding faculty, the job is translating exponential technology curves for executives who need to plan against them. Few speakers combine an operator record in autonomous vehicles, a founder’s claim on the commercial internet, and two decades of civil-liberties advocacy in the same briefing.

Key speaking topics

• Autonomous vehicles and the robotaxi industry
• Exponential technology and Moore’s Law thinking
• Artificial intelligence deployment and strategy
• Privacy, surveillance and civil liberties in a connected economy
• Internet history and the pattern of commercial technology shifts
• Future of mobility and urban transportation
• Cybersecurity and technology policy

Ideal for

• Boards and executive teams sizing investment or partnership decisions in autonomous vehicles, mobility or AI.
• CTOs and chief innovation officers testing internal assumptions about exponential technology timelines.
• General counsel, chief privacy officers and policy leads working through AI and surveillance exposure.
• Automotive, insurance, logistics and urban-planning leadership teams preparing for autonomous deployment.

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on which autonomous-vehicle timelines are grounded and which are vendor marketing.
• A working mental model for exponential technology curves and what they mean for planning horizons.
• Specific case material from inside the Google and Waymo programs that is hard to source elsewhere.
• A clearer view of the privacy, liability and civil-liberties questions that will shape AI and autonomy regulation.
• Named examples drawn from forty years of commercial internet history, used to pressure-test current assumptions.