Chris Nicholson

Chris Nicholson (born September 15, 1975) is an American entrepreneur and writer. He is the co-founder and CEO of the artificial intelligence/deep learning company Skymind and co-creator of the open source framework Deeplearning4j.

Nicholson served as head of communications and recruiting for almost two years at the Sequoia Capital-backed startup, FutureAdvisor. FutureAdvisor is a robo-advisor that was acquired by BlackRock for a reported $150 million to $200 million in 2015.

Nicholson co-founded Skymind in late 2014 with Adam Gibson. Skymind was admitted to Y Combinator's Winter 2016 batch and raised a seed round later that year from investors such as Tencent, Ron Conway's SV Angel, Ray Lane's Greatpoint Ventures, Google's Amit Singhal and Krishna Bharat, Joe Montana's Liquid2 Ventures and Muse's Matthew Bellamy. He is based the Bay Area.

Nicholson wrote for The New York Times Company for more than five years, reporting and editing for both The New York Times and the late International Herald-Tribune in Paris, France and Hong Kong while covering technology and finance. He also served as mergers and acquisitions editor for Bloomberg News and reported for both the news service and the magazine Bloomberg Businessweek. His writing on technology has appeared in Pacific Standard, TechCrunch, Pando Daily, Mattermark and The Next Web.

A fourth-generation Montanan, Nicholson was born in Billings, Montana and grew up in Helena, Montana, where he attended Helena High School.

Nicholson attended Deep Springs College, the all-male, tuition-free school near Bishop, California where students govern themselves, select each incoming cohort and hire and fire the faculty. He graduated in economics from the American University of Paris, studied Islamism with Gilles Kepel at Sciences-Po, and micro-finance with Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Nicholson is frequently quoted and speaks publicly on such topics as artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning trends in technology, and public relations.

Of Elon Musk's plans to mitigate the risk of SuperIntelligence, Wired quoted him as saying "Thinking about AI is the cocaine of technologists: it makes us excited, and needlessly paranoid."