Brian Pope, a writer, director, entrepreneur and philanthropist, founded Cognition in early 2015. Pope combines a deliberately unorthodox and progressive business philosophy with a passion for art, film and technology with a lifelong commitment to philanthropy in an effort to make Cognition like no other company before it. His interest in filmmaking and fascination with technologies that fuel media production stem from his early career experience in arms control and as an artist with George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. In addition to serving as the guiding force behind Cognition, Brian leads Last Rocket Out Pictures, a film and television production company focused on science fiction.

Brian is also behind a variety of innovative charitable initiatives that seek to harness and develop emerging technologies on behalf of pressing humanitarian issues. And with these priorities in mind, Brian founded The Arc/k Project, a 501 c3 non-profit organization which helps societies in extremis digitally archive, to the extent they can, that which is too valuable, too important, or too unique to be lost or forgotten. As great as the palaces of Versailles or as humble as a discarded arrowhead, Arc/k Project was created by Brian to straddle the gulf between scientific archiving and activism.