Joel Hyatt

Joel Z. Hyatt is an entrepreneur whose start-up ventures have spanned several industries, including legal services, technology, and media. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College (1972) and Yale Law School (1975).

In 1977, Hyatt co-founded Hyatt Legal Services, which built a new delivery system to provide affordable legal services to lower- and middle-income families nationwide. Hyatt also founded and built Hyatt Legal Plans, Inc., which pioneered employer-sponsored group legal plans. Hyatt Legal Plans was acquired by MetLife and continues to operate under its original name. Almost 200 of the Fortune 500 companies have a Hyatt Legal Plan providing legal services for their employees as an employee benefit.

In 2004, Joel Hyatt and former US Vice President Al Gore founded Current Media, which launched Current TV and Current.com. Current pioneered the concept of user-generated content. Current TV was carried into 70 million subscriber households in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Current TV received two Emmy awards, the Peabody Award, two Livingston Awards, the Dupont Award, and many other awards for outstanding investigative and participatory journalism. Current.com received a Webby Award for the best website of any cable television network. In 2013, Current TV was acquired by Al Jazeera.

Hyatt was the founding Chairman of VideoSurf, a computer vision search engine that Microsoft acquired in 2011.

Joel Hyatt was the Democratic Nominee for the US Senate in Ohio in 1994 and the National Finance Chair for the Democratic Party in 2000.

From 1998 to 2003, Hyatt served on Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business faculty, where he taught two highly popular courses on entrepreneurship.

In 2000, Hyatt co-authored “The Long Boom” with Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden.

Hyatt served on the Board of Trustees of Morehouse College from 1989 to 2006, the Board of Trustees of The Brookings Institution from 2001 to 2010, and the Board of Directors of Hewlett Packard from 2007 to 2011. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the RAND Corporation and the Board of Trustees of Stanford Hospital and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2015, Hyatt co-founded Globality, Inc., where he currently serves as Chairman and CEO. Joel’s mission is to rally enterprise companies to utilize AI technology for autonomous sourcing, driving more inclusive economies and making a profound impact on the world. Leading enterprises are automating their outdated buying processes by leveraging Globality’s generative AI-powered bot, Glo, to unleash productivity and purpose.