Tony Perkins
Anthony (Tony) Perkins, Founder, Editor & Chairman, Alchemist
Tony Perkins, is a pioneering technology business media entrepreneur, opinion leader and global community builder who grew up in Silicon Valley.
Mr. Perkins is currently founder, editor and chairman of the recently launched social media network, Alchemist (www.alchemist.io). Alchemist covers the global Silicon Valley with a venture capital perspective, and its members include entrepreneurs, venture investors and big tech corporate executives focused the innovation industries. Alchemist is currently planning to launch an Initial Currency Offering (ICO) to fund its long term development and growth. Mr. Perkins is also founder of Sunrise [Silicon Valley], an invitation-only, live member-based community that gathers and produces business and cultural events for leading-edge company founders, investors and artists.
During the 2000s, Mr. Perkins was the CEO of the global events and blog brand, AlwaysOn, that produced major entrepreneurial summits in Silicon Valley, Stanford University, New York, NASDAQ, and Southern California. AlwaysOn‘s focus was to connect entrepreneurs in the media, entertainment, cloud and greentech industries with venture investors and major corporate partners. AlwaysOn also produced its annual “AlwaysOn Global Top 250 Private Company” list, which highlighted the top venture capital-funded companies. In twelve years of producing the Global 250, AlwaysOn honored over 1,400 unique companies, of which over 45 percent have had successful exits.
During the 1990s, Mr. Perkins was founder and editor-in-chief of Red Herring magazine, which The Wall Street Journal described as the “bible of the Internet.” As a front row participant, Mr. Perkins and his writers chronicled the birth of the Internet industry, and the entrepreneurs and investors that made it happen, including Netscape, Amazon, eBay, Google, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia Capital. While Red Herring grew to over $100 million in revenue and 300 employees on the back of the Internet Bubble economy, Mr. Perkins could see that the math wasn’t adding up. In October of 1999, Harper Collins published Mr. Perkins’s prescient best-selling book; The Internet Bubble, that foretold the dot-com bust and warned investors to get out of the stock market quick.
Mr. Perkins began his career as the Vice President of Business Development and CoFounder of Silicon Valley Bank’s Technology Group. During Mr. Perkins’ five years working at the bank, he distinguished himself by completing financial transactions for over 70 venture capital funded companies. Mr. Perkins also created a joint venture with then investment bank, Hambrecht & Quist (bought by JP Morgan in 1999) and pioneered the bank’s warrant program which secured stock from private companies in lieu of banking fees. Today, Silicon Valley Bank has over $50 billion in assets, and stock warrant positions in over 5,000 companies under the program Mr. Perkins originally created.
Mr. Perkins served on President George W. Bush’s Information Technology Advisory Council and was the founding chairman of the Churchill Club, a 10,000-member non-profit speakers forum in Silicon Valley for which he received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. For his editorial achievements, Mr. Perkins received the Albert Einstein Technology Medal from the State of Israel, and has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s Media Leaders group since 1996.
