Joel Hyatt

Joel Z. Hyatt (born Joel Hyatt Zylberberg; May 6, 1950) is an American entrepreneur and former politician. He founded Hyatt Legal Services, and was featured in his firm's nationwide television commercials which always ended with the slogan, "I'm Joel Hyatt and you have my word on it." Hyatt was a co-founder of Current TV.

Life and career Hyatt graduated from Dartmouth College and Yale Law School. He briefly practiced law as an associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. The case was an inspiration for the 1993 film Philadelphia, alongside the more renowned Geoffrey Bowers case three-years prior. Hyatt is known to have expressed his disappointment in his own firm's handling of the case, and of its treatment of Mr. Cain.

Hyatt was appointed to the California Public Utilities Commission in June 1999, by Governor Gray Davis. He served six months of a six-year term, resigning in December 1999.

Hyatt served as National Finance Chair for the Democratic party in 2000, and is a business partner of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. In 2004, Hyatt and Gore purchased Newsworld International, a cable news channel, programmed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which aired news programming from around the world. On August 1, 2005, Gore and Hyatt relaunched the network as Current TV, a young adult-programmed news and information service which pioneered the concept of user generated content on cable TV. Hyatt and Gore later sold the channel to Al Jazeera Media Network on January 2, 2013 for a reported $500 million. In August 2014, Hyatt and Gore sued Al Jazeera for fraud and breach of contract in connection with a residual payment of $65 million that remained unpaid. The allegations were denied by Al Jazeera as "blatantly false" and "potentially misleading."

Hyatt taught entrepreneurship at Stanford University Graduate School of Business from 1998 to 2003 and at Stanford Law school. He is a member of the board of trustees of Morehouse College and of The Brookings Institution. Hyatt was elected to the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard Company in May 2007, and of The RAND Corporation in March 2015. Hyatt is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He also serves on the board of Stanford Hospital.

Hyatt was an investor in and chairman of VideoSurf, a computer vision search engine that was acquired by Microsoft in 2011.

Globality Inc, based in Menlo Park, California, is Joel Hyatt's current business venture. The company was co-founded by Joel Hyatt and Lior Delgo in March 2015. At the time of its launch, Globality had invited 350 advertising companies to use its services. In 2019, SoftBank invested $100m.

Books

The Long Boom: A History of the World's Future, 1980-2020, by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, and Joel Hyatt (Basic Books, 2000)

Electoral History