Venkatesh Rao

After resigning from Xerox in 2011, Rao worked as an independent consultant in Seattle and published his popular Breaking Smart newsletter series while writing his blog Ribbonfarm. He is currently employed at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles.

Rao founded and regularly contributes to his blog Ribbonfarm. As a consultant for Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Andreesen Horowitz, he launched the Breaking Smart newsletter, which has been translated into multiple languages. He's also written for Aeon, The Atlantic, Forbes, and been a guest on The Atavist's Longform podcast. In 2011, Rao published Tempo, a book on strategy and decision-making which has been praised by David Allen and Daniel H. Pink. His theories have influenced curator Troy Conrad Therrien's work at the Guggenheim Museum, and the 2018 Guggenheim Bilbao exhibition Architectural Effects prominently showcased his work.. He is also known to have coined the terms "premium mediocre" and "domestic cozy".

After graduating with a bachelor of technology in Mechanical Engineering degree in 1997 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, he secured an F1 visa to study in the United States. Rao received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan. His dissertation, Team Formation and Breakup in Multiagent Systems, drew from "control theory, scheduling theory, and artificial intelligence" in an attempt solve multiagent problems in relation to "unmanned vehicle systems" and "autonomous constellations of spacecraft."

Venkatesh Rao (born 1974) is an Indian-American author and consultant. He has previously worked as a researcher at Cornell University and Xerox.