I speak, write, and bring communities together for meaningful conversations.

"How might we cooperate at scale, coordinate our efforts and shape our own behaviors to create a more just and equitable world? What if we built the incentives that in turn shape us, the nudges which influence our everyday habits and choices? Imagine new regenerative economies that nudge us towards equilibrium. Imagine reinventing ideas of ownership, access, liberty and self-determination. ​What do we want to incentivize?"



Since first arriving in the Bay Area in 2000, Raman has built companies and communities, bringing people together around meaningful conversations about art, technology, religion, politics and philosophy. He’s founded or co-founded businesses such as Frey Norris Gallery, The Bureau, GP Dinners and Camp Earnest. Raman has served on the boards of organizations like Epicenter Arts and YBCA. As an event producer, public speaker, moderator and interviewer, he enjoys spontaneous and unscripted interviews both online and at a variety of favorite venues. His events celebrate the ideal of civil discourse, amongst people with contrasting points of view. Raman's first manuscript on Incentive System Design is currently under revision. ISD is thinking differently and comprehensively about how we shape our own and one anothers’ behaviors and designing systems that guide those behaviors in desired directions, particularly our choices as participants in an economy. ISD seeks to propagate greater human equality, to grow dignity, to restrain production and consumption, bolstering regeneration and equilibrium in natural systems.Raman has also served in advisory capacities for a number of stealth and launched startups, including New Age Meats, Better Humans and AH Global. As of spring, 2021, he is an advisor at Zymmo, Eqogo, Talgo and Lohika, where he's the host of their online event series Re:Think. In 2012 he founded Good People Dinners, a Bay Area community that fosters substantive conversations, usually over food and drink. These dinners, corporate salons, overnights and retreats bring together professional chefs and speakers on a wide range of topics. GP Dinners has produced over 250 events and counting, dinners, overnights, retreats and corporate salon series for the likes of Mozilla, Lohika, Frog Design, Altran and Synapse. In 2020, Raman co-founded Camp Earnest with his partner Karin Johnson. Camp Earnest is a former summer camp in the mountains of northern California, 46 miles from Yosemite National Park. Earnest's 21 acres include a rental house, several cabins, two three season bell tents, dining lodge, cedar bathhouse with toilets, showers, a Finnish sauna, and a large cedar hot tub. An Acoustic Amphitheater and a meditation and movement hall have both been refurbished and hosted groups. Visitors enjoy our fire pits and circles, our year round spring fed creek, waterfalls and a rock labyrinth. Camp Earnest provides a relaxing place to stay and, during our events, chef prepared farm to table feasts. At camp, we produce and host facilitated programs and workshops that ground us in our shared humanity and hopes for an inspiring future. Raman has written op-eds at a variety of publications, authored books on art and currently posts with some regularity on Medium. An avid traveler, mountaineer, scuba diver, and amateur chef, Raman hosts dinners for friends at his home as often as he can.

Medium member since April 2020
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