Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership Series

Purple Cotton Candy and Sunglasses!

 SMS and I went to the second Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership Series talk at Stanford on Wednesday afternoon.  We managed to get out of work a little on the early side and head over to the Huang Engineering Center on the Stanford Campus.  It was an amazing event and the turnout was spectacular.  We couldn't even get into the auditorium although there was an AV set-up in the lobby that allowed us to hear the panel discussion.

There were three panelists- Christina Smolke, a bioengineering professor; Steve Jurvetson, a partner-level venture capitalist and Astro Teller, the head of Google X.  I suspect Mr. Teller was the reason for the huge turnout but who knows.  The panel looked backwards and forwards along the timeline of tech development and was fairly interesting.  I wasn't the biggest fan of the moderator.  She was a little too in love with her own cleverness and her questions were convoluted.  I think she was trying to channel a NPR Terry Gross-like style and wasn't completely successful.

Foreground, Marty McFly's car Background, Newest Tesla!

Afterwards, there were several companies displaying their products and free food!  I got to try on the Oculus VR goggles which were amazing.  It is still sort of a novelty type of entertainment- I could sculpt a "clay" structure and manipulate it in various ways- size, orientation, decoration, color.  It was really, really cool.  We also saw the Back to the Future car and got free cotton candy.  It was a really fun event and I think we'll go again if we can swing the somewhat early start time (4:30).