Hosted at Microsoft Research Center in Mountain View, CA, and sponsored by IBM and Nokia, a couple hundred of us crowded in to hear this great set of panels and speakers on Game Changing Technlogies today, organized by that great "meet-up" group, SV Forum. Today's organizers were Bernard Golden (who worked for me at Informix a mere twenty years ago and is today a key blogger for CIO Magazine), John Murray from SRI International, and Geoffrey Doyle from Percipient Capital.
Wow, what a great day! Dr. Jeff Weiser, head of IBM's Advanced Research Center keynoted, ahead of a 3D Printing panel, then the CEO of BOX described how they've gone to $1B revenue in three years from a standing start, and then Golden chaired a panel of three VCs, including original investors in Skype, Box, DocuSign, and scores of others. Golden said as of last Monday, his own business card had changed, since Dell bought their Enterprise Cloud Services company over the weekend.
Paul Saffo, my great Futurist buddy, saw me in the audience, and stopped the room with his opening, "Chuck, I thought this was an exclusive event!" which caused lots of folk to say, "you know him from somewhere?" We've worked together for thirty years, and he still proudly lists his Distinguished Visiting Fellow title with Media X that I bestowed five years ago (ironic, that is now my title there too)
A quick summary -- Paul said, and it echoed through the day: Identify Driving Forces, Look for Cross-Impacts, Cherish Failure (especially if is someone else's), and know that Indicators Precede Inflections --> all of this says "EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY" and boy, do we have it today
Playing that against the Milken final panel advice is constructive -- they said they look for teams which have A GREAT IDEA that fills a need and can scale; for teams that are in fact a team and can execute; they look for passion, enthusiasm, and importantly, perseverance; and they look for monetizing evidence (ie. someone will in fact pay for it)
What a privilege I've had these past few days to attend these groups!
Questions? Happy to address them
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