Robb Smith

Founder & CEO

Robb is founder of the Institute of Applied Metatheory and leader of its executive team. He is a lifelong social innovator who coined the term the Transformation Age and has been a leader in integral philosophy and the global integrative metatheory movement. At the Institute of Applied Metatheory he has led development from founding to nearly a hundred scholars, innovator and experts dedicated to applying big pictures to the world's most complex contexts. He has led design, recruitment or incubation of over a dozen initiatives, including The New Story of Wholeness, Sociology of Big Pictures, Metacrisis Mapping Initiative, Cultural Complexity Index, Faith Development Pathway, Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice, Evolution of Philanthropy, IAM Press and others. He also designed and launched Alethic AI, the first of a new category of metacognitive AI designed to support meta-reflexive sensemaking for leaders navigating wicked contexts, and published Beyond Alignment, a paper outlining a different, more coherent philosophical paradigm for AI alignment. He is CEO and co-founder of Integral Life, a hub of the integral philosophy movement, where he published The Great Release, a metatheory accurately diagnosing the rise of populism, as well as dozens of courses, books, podcasts, and events. He was founder and CEO of Chrysallis, the world's most comprehensive human development app, nominated for the Goldman Sachs Healthcare Startup of the Year and the IONS award for Transformational Technology before being acquired in 2016. His 2012 TEDx talk named the dawning Transformation Age, predicted the rise of today's social morphogenesis and outlined the full-spectrum resilience that would be needed to meet it. He was CEO of Integral Institute, which sponsored the application of integral metatheory to over 60 different academic fields, and published the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice (SUNY Press). He was a co-founding member of the Conscious Capitalism movement. Prior to that, he was a co-founder and partner in Nevada Ventures, the state's first venture capital fund, and helped build Nevada's innovation economy. He is a former director of Alere, which became the largest population health management company in the United States (NYSE: ALR). He was named Nevada's Young Entrepreneur of the Year and is former president of Entrepreneur's Organization Reno-Tahoe. He started the Nevada Ventures Nanoscience Program at the University of Nevada and co-founded Nevada Nano, which currently is building the world's most advanced methane detection network. He is a graduate of University of Nevada, the Venture Capital Institute and held the Certified Management Accountant and Certified in Financial Management designations. He was a fellow of Desert Research Institute and Aspen Institute, and a former trustee of Nevada Museum of Art. He was named to Nevada Top 20 under 40 lists in three different decades and was nominated for the TED Prize.