Biographer Walter Isaacson And Medium CEO Ev Williams To Speak At Disrupt SF

We’re excited to announce that author Walter Isaacson and entrepreneur Ev Williams will be joining us onstage at Disrupt SF next week.

Well technically, anyone who paid attention to the agenda we published last week knew they were going to be taking the stage, but now we can tell you a little more about what they’ll discuss.

Isaacson is probably best-known to TechCrunch readers as the author of the bestselling biography Steve Jobs, but he also wrote acclaimed volumes on Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. And he serves as president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.

Isaacson has a new book coming out in October, titled The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. The book covers innovators from Ada Lovelace to Larry Page, and in the words of its publisher, “is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens.”

Prior to publication, Isaacson took an interesting approach to getting crowdsourced feedback and fact-checking — he posted excerpts online, asking for comments and corrections. (And he got them.) Specifically, he published those excerpts on blogging platform Medium, where Williams is CEO.

Williams is a pretty notable innovator himself. He co-founded Blogger and Twitter, and at Medium, he’s building a new kind of media company that combines a publishing platform with high-quality, journalistic content.

TechCrunch Co-Editor Matthew Panzarino will be interviewing Isaacson and Williams about The Innovators, Medium, and more.

Isaacson and Williams join Disrupt SF’s impressive roster of speakers, which includes Marc Benioff, Travis Kalanick, Vinod Khosla, Mark Cuban, Elizabeth Holmes and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen.

There are still tickets available for Disrupt SF, which kicks off with a 24-hour hackathon on September 6. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, reach out to our sponsorship team for more information.

[original photos via Flickr/Joi Ito and Flickr/US Department of Education]