He calls the future for a living. His hit rate embarrasses the professionals.
From a small island town in Puget Sound, Mark Anderson runs a forecasting operation whose weekly report lands in the inboxes of some of the most powerful people in technology. Now he is building the machine that finds the patterns humans miss.
The Dispatch
Friday Harbor has a ferry dock, a couple of thousand residents, and a man who tells the technology industry what is coming next. Mark Anderson runs Pattern Computer and Strategic News Service from the San Juan Islands, roughly as far from Silicon Valley as you can get and still be in the same time zone. The distance is the point. Away from the noise, he watches the signal.
Anderson is the Founding Chair and CEO of Pattern Computer, an artificial intelligence company that specializes in one deceptively simple thing: finding patterns in high-dimensional data that no human, and most machines, would ever spot. The company describes its work as pattern discovery - surfacing hidden relationships and generating hypotheses across data so complex it defeats ordinary analysis. The pitch is not that the software answers your question. It is that the software finds the question you did not know to ask.
That ambition sits on top of a career built on being right in public. Anderson founded Strategic News Service in 1989 and launched its weekly SNS Global Report in 1995. The report covers the intersection of technology, economics and geopolitics, and its subscriber list reads like a who's who of the industry. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are among the readers. For a newsletter, that is a remarkable room to command every week.
In March 2007, Anderson went on CNBC Europe and predicted a great financial collapse. Months later, it arrived. He has no formal training in finance or economics, which makes the call either luck or something stranger. Then he did it again, forecasting the oil price collapse of 2014 to 2015. He is, by his own account and the public record, the only person to have predicted both events out loud, ahead of time.
The predictions are not a party trick. Every year SNS publishes Mark Anderson's Top 10 Predictions for the coming year, and every year those predictions get graded in public. The scoreboard sits above 95% accuracy. It is the kind of number that invites skepticism, which is exactly why the grading is done openly, prediction by prediction, year after year.
Anderson has a habit of naming things before they exist. In 1997 he described what he called the CarryAlong category - portable computers that later showed up as netbooks and tablets. In 1998 he sketched the Internet Assistant, a voice-driven helper that arrived years later as Siri and Google Now. Naming a category before the product exists is a forecaster's flex. It also happens to be useful: give an idea a name and people can start building toward it.
The forecasting is the headline, but the resume underneath it is deep. Anderson co-founded MAJIQ, a global leader in enterprise software and services for the pulp and paper industry, and served as its president until 2005. He founded the Washington Technology Industry Association's "Fast Pitch" investment forum, one of the state's premier technology investment events. He designed the wireless spectrum auction process for Sweden and helped accelerate 3G deployment in Iceland. The through line is a person who likes to build the mechanism, not just comment on it.
He also chairs Future in Review, better known as FiRe, a conference he established in 2003. The Economist called it the best technology conference in the world. It gathers scientists, executives and policymakers to argue about what comes next - a live version of the report Anderson has been writing for decades.
Anderson's curiosity does not stay in its lane. He co-founded ORCA, the Orca Relief Citizens' Alliance, a nonprofit working to reduce mortality among the Southern Resident Killer Whales that share his corner of the Salish Sea. He launched INVNT/IP to document and combat intellectual property theft, work that put him in a 60 Minutes segment on the subject. His self-authored biography credits him with economic frameworks he calls Flow Economics and even a physics "Theory of Everything" he named Resonance Theory. Not all of it is peer-reviewed. All of it is unmistakably his.
In 2018 he published The Pattern Future: Finding the World's Great Secrets and Predicting the Future Using Pattern Discovery. The title doubles as a mission statement. Two years earlier he had founded Pattern Computer to turn the idea into software. The book explains the method; the company is the method at scale.
What ties it together is a single conviction: that the future is not random, that it leaves patterns, and that whoever learns to read those patterns - human or machine - gets to see around the corner. Anderson has spent a career reading them by hand. Pattern Computer is his bet that a machine can do it faster, across data too vast for any one mind. If the track record is any guide, it is a bet worth watching.
In January 2026 he unveiled the SNS 2026 Top 10 Predictions in a live event and joined the Pitchforce JPM Investment Summit. The scoreboard for those calls will be graded, in public, a year from now. That is the deal Anderson has always offered: say it out loud, put a date on it, and let the record decide.
The Ventures
An AI firm that discovers hidden patterns and generates hypotheses in high-dimensional data.
The weekly SNS Global Report on technology, economics and geopolitics, read worldwide.
The FiRe conference, called by The Economist the best technology conference in the world.
Enterprise software leader for the pulp and paper industry, where he served as president.
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