Rich Sorkin is the Chairman, CEO and cofounder of Jupiter Intelligence, based in Silicon Valley. Jupiter provides data analysis through predictive modeling to help governments, organizations and society manage risks from climate change, natural disasters, and sea level rise. Led by veterans of Fortune 100 companies, machine learning pioneers, a Nobel Prize winner, and scientists from NOAA and the National Science Foundation, the firm offers services to predict weather risks from two hours to 50 years in the future.
In his three-decade-long career as a serial entrepreneur, executive, advisor, board member and investor, he has led breakthrough companies in numerous industries. Sorkin focuses on commercializing transformative technologies, with a significant concentration on financial services, energy, media, politics, and the environment. A founder of multiple startups, his companies have pioneered the use of satellite data and scalable cloud computing to predict weather events for commodity traders, applied analytics to detect identity theft, and strengthened connections between entertainers and their networks.
Sorkin is the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Zip2, an Internet 1.0 company best known for analytics and visualization of geospatial data. He served as president of Kaggle prior to its acquisition by Google, leading the introduction of big data predictive analytics into the enterprise market and serving as the company’s premier industry strategist.
Sorkin began his career as a consultant at Bain & Company. Before moving to Silicon Valley to focus on leading technology companies, he helped initiate research of the supercomputer industry at Goldman Sachs. After graduating business school, he ran the Sound Blaster business at Creative Labs during the time it gained market dominance, growing revenues from under $100M to close to $1 billion.
Sorkin is an alumnus of Yale University and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was a Lockheed Scholar. He has served as a Board Member at publicly-traded companies, private firms, the Yale University Development Board, and several non-profit organizations.