06.23.06
SDForum Visionary Award
I was in the SDForum visionary award event this Tuesday night. SDForum is one of the non-profit organizations HP sponsors for the Venture outreach effort. The event is truly amazing and by invitation only. Even though I have been participating in the visionary award event for the last 3 years, I am always amazed by the caliber of the recipients. This year was no exception; The 4 recipients are:
· Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, al “Founding Father of the Internet.” He has made significant contributions to technology as co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet with a great sentence like “IP on everything”
· John L. Hennessy, President of Stanford University, is a distinguished professor of computer science, a successful entrepreneur and a foremost authority on computer architecture. He is best known for MIPS and his work in the development of “reduced instruction set command” or RISC architecture enabling the successful scaling of the Internet.
· Louis Gerstner., Retired Chairman and CEO of IBM. He is considered by many as the force behind the revival of IBM in the 90s. He turned around IBM after taking over as CEO in 1993 and with “e-business” played a significant role in defining the impact of the Internet on business and society.
· Terry Semel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo. He is considered a strategist with a bold master plan to transform Yahoo into the 21st century’s first media titan. With his media and entertainment background, Semel is transforming what the Internet will look like in the future.
In addition to the leaders above, I am just in awe among some of the greatest entrepreneurs like Jerry Yang of Yahoo, VC partners from KPCB, NEA, Mobius, Woodside, Trinity, and a long list of others. I think this is definitely one of the top events for business leaders to be part of. In addition, the event has been hosted in Heidi Roizen’s house for the last 3 years. In my mind, the house tour and food alone is probably worth the trip by itself.