James Altucher

James Altucher is the speaker on this page who is interesting because of what went wrong, repeatedly, rather than despite it.

He has founded around twenty companies and invested in more than thirty. Several of the companies failed. He has written publicly and in unusual detail about losing substantial amounts of money more than once, which is a kind of candor that is rare on a corporate stage and is the whole reason the material works.

His best-known book is Choose Yourself: Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream, named by USA Today among its twelve best business books of all time. The argument is that the institutions people used to rely on for a career no longer reliably provide one, so the practical response is to build your own platform, skills and optionality rather than wait to be picked. He also hosts The James Altucher Show, with more than forty million downloads, and is a chess master.

On an innovation roster his contribution is the tolerance-for-failure half of the subject. Most innovation speakers describe how good ideas get shipped. He can describe, concretely, what it is like to be inside a bet that does not work, what the recovery actually required, and how to tell early that something is not going to come together. That is the part of innovation most conference content avoids.

He is a strong fit for entrepreneurship events, innovation and strategy summits, and audiences going through restructuring or reinvention. He is the wrong booking for an organization wanting a polished corporate keynote with a tidy arc, because the appeal is the unvarnished version and he does not sand it down.