Charles Henry Ferguson (born March 24, 1955)[1] is an angel investor and strategic advisor to early stage technology startups and venture capital firms, especially in artificial intelligence.[2] He is also the founder and president of Representational Pictures, Inc. and American director and producer of four feature documentaries, including No End in Sight (2007), which won the Sundance Special Jury Prize[3] and Inside Job (2010),[4] which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.[5] Prior to making films, Ferguson was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution,[6] a Visiting Scholar at MIT and UC Berkeley, and a visiting lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Earlier in his career Ferguson was the founder (with Randy Forgaard) and CEO of Vermeer Technologies, developer of FrontPage, which was sold to Microsoft in 1996. Ferguson holds a BA in mathematics from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. Ferguson is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations[7] and sits on the board of directors of the French American Foundation.[8]
In 1994, Ferguson founded Vermeer Technologies, one of the earliest Internet software companies, with Randy Forgaard. Vermeer created the first visual website development tool, FrontPage. In early 1996, Ferguson sold Vermeer for $133 million to Microsoft,[12] which integrated FrontPage into Microsoft Office.
After selling Vermeer, Ferguson returned to research and writing. He was a visiting scholar and lecturer for several years at MIT and Berkeley, and for three years was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Ferguson is the author of four books and many articles dealing with various aspects of information technology and its relationships to economic, political, and social issues. Ferguson is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a director of the French-American Foundation, and supports several nonprofit organizations.
For more than 20 years, Ferguson had been intensely interested in film, and regularly attended film festivals such as the Telluride Film Festival for over a decade. In mid-2005, he formed Representational Pictures and began production of No End in Sight, which was one of the first feature-length documentaries on post-war Iraq.
On September 30, 2013, Charles Ferguson wrote on the Huffington Post[20] that he would be cancelling his CNN documentary on Hillary Clinton due, not just to pressure from the Clintons and their allies, but also from the Republican Party, to stop pursuing the project. In the article Ferguson lamented that『nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this film. Not Democrats, not Republicans – and certainly nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons or dreams of a position in a Hillary Clinton administration.』In a June 2013 interview with former President Bill Clinton, Clinton told Ferguson that he and Larry Summers couldn't change Alan Greenspan's mind about the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated derivatives and helped fuel the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.[21] Congress then passed the Act with a veto-proof supermajority. Ferguson thought Clinton was "a really good actor" and that this was a lie. Actually, Ferguson wrote, the Clinton Administration and Larry Summers lobbied for the Act and, along with Robert Rubin privately attacked advocates of regulation.[20]
Starting in 2022, Ferguson has become an extremely active early stage technology investor and startup advisor. He is a limited partner in six early stage venture capital funds, and is an angel investor in early stage technology startups. Recent investments include placing the first money into Aperture Data, Dicer, Aomni, Pally, Paradigm and Cofactory.[25]
Predator Nation. Crown Business. 2012. ISBN978-0307952561. This is a companion to the movie Inside Job, providing citations for many of the claims in that movie.
^Terence Abad (Winter 2008). "Caught in the Headlines"(PDF). Lowell Alumni Association. p. 2. Archived from the original(PDF) on July 19, 2011. Retrieved 2011-04-13.
^Steve Rose (July 9, 2013). "WikiLeaks documentary: 'Julian Assange wanted $1m'". The Guardian. Archived from the original on July 21, 2019. Retrieved July 20, 2019. This article was amended on Wednesday 10 July 2013. The original article said director Charles Ferguson is working on a WikiLeaks documentary. We have since found out that the project has been put on hold.
