Rip Gerber is a biochemical engineer, technologist and author.  In addition to writing science-based thrillers, he has patented and created technologies that he’s turned into companies.  Rip took one public on NASDAQ, sold another to Nokia.  He’s currently CEO of LOC-AID (www.loc-aid.com), the mobile industry’s largest location gateway, delivering location data to over 300M wireless subscribers.

So how did this true advocate of technology come to write thrillers in which ‘tech runs wild’ and scientists, left unchecked, wreak havoc on the world?

The back story provides clues.  Rip began his career at the Central Intelligence Agency, categorizing Soviet newspapers and evaluating recruits in the Psychological Assessment Division.  He left the CIA and joined Firestone Tire & Rubber, where he designed the company’s first chromatic polyethylene manufacturing plant in Hopewell, Virginia.  Hopewell, a city created by DuPont to manufacture kepone in World War I, was a rare east coast ghost town until Firestone and Allied-Signal moved in.  But the soot and decay of Hopewell pushed Rip out and up to New York City and American Express, where Rip designed and launched the financial industry’s first online credit card application.  After getting his MBA from Harvard Business School, Rip headed west to San Francisco.  He was a strategy consultant for Deloitte & Touche, and ran global marketing divisions for two advertising agencies, first for Digitas and then for the $40B Carlson Companies.  But technology kept calling.  He founded @once, an email marketing company acquired by Yesmail, and then took Commtouch, an Internet security company, public in 1999.  He then served as EVP and Chief Marketing Officer for the world’s leading email platform company Intellisync which, after two years of turning around this product and brand, he sold to Nokia for half a billion dollars.  After taking some time off to rebuild a house lost to a San Francisco fire, Rip became a board advisor and consulant to several large tech companies, including PRG-Schultz (Ticker: PRGX) and Newell Rubbermaid (Ticker: NWL).  Along the way, he wrote technology thrillers.

In 2007, Random House published Rip’s first novel, in German.  PHARMA became a best-seller in Germany.  A sequel to that book, currently titled KILLER VIRUS, will be released by Random House/Heyne in Germany in Winter 2010.  In June 2010, Rip’s short-story THE LAST SUPPER was published by Tor Books in the ITW Thriller Anthology FIRST THRILLS edited by Lee Child.  Two other thrillers are in development, as is one mystery.

Rip has accompanied DEA agents on drug raids in Los Angeles, run marathons with the elderly, gone mushroom hunting with the world’s leading mycologicalist, documented Burning Man, debated the NIH, disrupted his local MENSA chapter and watched 5 full seasons of LOST in a single summer…all in the name of thriller research.  Rip lives in San Francisco and Point Reyes, California.