Walter De Brouwer was nicknamed by Corriere della Sera the "Woody Allen del business" because of his übernerd personality. He is most known as the founder of the European cult company Starlab, the first private blue sky research laboratory (called 'Nerd Heaven') that once, together with Paul Allen's Interval and MIT specialized in highly advanced 'deep future' research. This gained him the reputation as a futurist and big-picture thinker. De Brouwer was asked for the 20th Anniversary of The Wall Street Journal Europe as one of the four guru's to depict the World in 2023 together with John Naisbitt (Global Paradox), Bill Ghitis (Dupont) and Shai Agassi (SAP).

De Brouwer studied Philology at the University of Ghent and did his PhD in Semiotics at the University of Tilburg (Holland). He started his academic career as an assistant lecturer at the Jesuit University UFSIA (Antwerp) but left academia in 1989 and became an entrepreneur. In 17 years' time he set up more than 40 companies, was involved in several international IPO's (Stepstone [LSE: sso], Eunet-Qwest [nyse:Q]) and stood at the cradle of long-distance carriers in two continents (Eunet, Qwest). Originally De Brouwer's expertise was in publishing; he founded an international publishing house that published three computer magazines in three countries and was taken over by VNU in 1995.

In 2008 Walter De Brouwer was elected Chairman of the (British) Royal Society of Arts (RSA, Europe) serves since 2003 as a Director of the Tau Zero Foundation, which was formerly known as NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project