Riva-Melissa Tez

Riva-Melissa Tez is a British entrepreneur in business and nonprofits, writer, speaker, and advocate for transhumanism.
Early life and education
Originally from the United Kingdom, Tez father was an electrical engineer and her mother was schizophrenic; she spent time in a homeless shelter as a child. after her father left her mother. She and her mother and sister eventually moved into public housing, living on about £60 a week. where she studied philosophy at University College London; she says that she chose that major to try to better understand her mother's condition and how people justify their beliefs.
Career
At the end of 2009, Tez co-founded the toy store R.S. Currie on Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill. She also founded StickStar, an online social image-sharing social network for children.
At a Berlin Singularity meeting she had met Michael Vassar who was with the Singularity Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area, who suggested she would like the culture in San Francisco and could learn more about IT there. and Zoltan Istvan published an interview with her in Psychology Today called "Interview with Transhumanism Advocate Riva-Melissa Tez" that carried the subtitle, "Women are rare in the transhumanism field. Riva-Melissa Tez is a shining light"; the interview discussed women in the transhumanist movement and Tez' perspectives on where the movement was going.
In June 2015, she joined the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies as an affiliate scholar.
In San Francisco she became interested in how new technologies are developed and brought to market, and in the culture of investing in life extension and IT and especially artificial intelligence companies; she spent several months researching investment with the intent of setting up a new investment fund, but eventually realized that the bottleneck was not money, but rather a shortage of investable companies intent on bringing truly transformative technologies to market. By May of 2016 and working with Peter Bruce-Clark, who had been studying new investment models at Stanford University and with whom she had been discussing investment models, she co-founded Permutation Ventures, an incubator to help tech companies focus their efforts and become fundable.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu