John La Grou

John La Grou
John La Grou at TED 2014 Vancouver.jpg John La Grou at TED 2014 Vancouver.jpg John La Grou at the annual TED Conference Vancouver 2014
Born	(1956-01-16) January 16, 1956 Santa Ana, California, USA
🏳️ Nationality	United States, New Zealand (NZ permanent resident)
🎓 Alma mater	Cal Poly
💼 Occupation	Start up member of Acer America Co-founder POW-R Founder Millennia Co-founder Compathos Foundation
🌐 Website	www.mil-media.com filmsfortheplanet.com

John La Grou (born 1956) is an inventor and entrepreneur from the United States. He is CEO and founder of Millennia Media and Chair and co-founder of POW-R Consortium. Before that, he was one of three original start-up members at Acer America. La Grou is also known for his writing and lecturing on technology futures and the impact of technology on religion and spirituality. He is an Edmund Hillary Fellow and a maker of premium wines.

Early life

La Grou was born in 1956 in Orange County, California, the son of Otto La Grou, an engineer and semi-pro baseball pitcher, and Ruth La Grou (nee Kimble), a jazz singer. Inspired and encouraged by his parents, La Grou began playing musical instruments and experimenting with audio and radio electronics at an early age. He studied math and coding at UC Irvine beginning at age 13. In his later teens, he played professionally in Los Angeles-based pop-rock band Pegasus (guitar) and prog-rock band Gazelle (bass). He later attended Cal Poly in the EE program and played guitar in the Cal Poly Big Band.

Career

In 1985, La Grou joined Multitech Electronics in Mountain View, California as one of three original U.S. start-up members. La Grou guided Multitech’s U.S. OEM group, which by 1990 represented 25% of corporate revenue, approaching one million OEM PCs shipped annually. In 1987, the company name was changed to Acer and was taken public in 1988. La Grou left Acer in 1990 to start Millennia Media, an acoustic music production company specializing in symphony orchestra recording. During Millennia’s early era, La Grou applied his engineering background to design his own recording electronics. Millennia has since received over 30 industry awards and in 2019 was inducted into the Technology Hall of Fame, as reported in Forbes. La Grou has authored numerous patents and technical papers in the field of professional audio.

In 1997, La Grou started the POW-R Consortium to address a need for high quality audio bit length reduction, and remains today as the company’s chairman. POW-R software is licensed by Apple-Logic, Avid-ProTools, Ableton-Live, Sequoia-Samplitude, Cakewalk-Sonar, and others. Together with Richard Simpson, first Chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Stephen Jarvis, La Grou co-patented an electrical safety and energy saving technology called SafePlug. The invention was awarded “Best of Innovation and Design” honors at CES 2012, the 2014 CEA Mark of Excellence Award, CEPro 2012 Best Electronic Systems Technologies Award, and was described by Scientific American Magazine as “one of 10 world-changing ideas.” La Grou was invited to give a TED Talk at the 2009 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA to describe the invention. His TED Talk has been translated into 34 languages and was given media coverage in Popular Science, Radio World, TechCrunch, TreeHugger and others.

External video

“John La Grou: A Plug for Smart Power Outlets”, TED Talks

John is a co-founder of the Compathos Foundation, a social action network. John and spouse Thea La Grou executive produced a Compathos documentary film entitled Drawn From Water. The film, with music by Sigur Rós and Eric Hester, won awards at five American film festivals and won the Grand Award (category: World Music) at the John Lennon Music Awards. Selected by the New Zealand government as an Edmund Hillary Fellow in 2018, as reported in Bloomberg. La Grou was chartered to explore and promote new forms of socially generative “ESG” corporate organization. La Grou has written extensively in technical journals, with features in publications such as EQ, MIX, R-E-P, Tape Op, and Stereophile. He was selected as an author in the first virtual crowd-sourced anthology entitled The Age of Conversation. He later created Wikiklesia Press, a publishing vehicle for self-organizing, crowd-sourced anthologies. The first Wikiklesia book, entitled Voices of the Virtual World, won the SNCR Award of Merit, and was reviewed by (among others) Wired Magazine Executive Editor Kevin Kelly, who wrote, “Uttered like a prayer retrieved from the year 2030, spoken in a new tongue, a new form. Listen!” John is a frequent guest lecturer in audio technology and technology futures at colleges and universities, including Stanford, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, McGill, Berklee Music, and others. He is also a frequent lecturer at global conferences including AES USA and Worldwide, CES Las Vegas, Project BBQ, Sound Check Mexico, NAMM, SXSW, and Renaissance Weekend.. In 2021, La Grou was a featured long-form guest on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s technology show “Spark” discussing the future of music. La Grou serves on college and university boards and is a long-time voting member at the Grammy® Awards. He has made premium wines since 2003 in the Sierra Foothill wine country of California and has received over 150 winemaking medals in California wine competitions, including numerous Double Gold and Best of Class awards. He has been married to Thea for 40 years. He has one son, who attended USC, graduating magna cum laude.

External links

• John La Grou on IMDb
• John La Grou at AllMusic
• "A plug for smart power outlets" (TED2009)
• John La Grou at TED

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• Proud Pour
• Convergent and divergent production
• Future Search
• Futuribles International
• Interdependence
• Management cockpit
• Digital strategy

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