the really cool people – Andrew Hargadon, Jean Paul Jacob, Julien Decot

UC Berkeley lectures were wonderful the last couple of days. Today I attended a CITRIS lecture by Andrew Hargadon, a historian of technology and Director of the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship. There was a lot in it but my personal take home message was that before I contact the Venture Capitalists down on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley I need to have a team put together. The saying down there apparently is, “No team—no money!” Making up a business plan is important, of course, but having found some people who are willing to work on the project is essential. I was able to talk with Professor Hargadon for about fifteen minutes after the lecture while we walked over to his parking lot. I feel I must get my projects into production and although I am being a bit aggressive it seems to be necessary and appropriate for an outsider, such as myself, in order to make any progress at all.

Later, over at the Haas School of Business, the fall 2008 Management of Technology lecture series featured Jean Paul Jacob, a technology evangelist from IBM. This was another exciting lecture by a man who had been at the center of the computer revolution for the last forty years. He covered many of the emerging technologies, RFID, truly massive digital memory storage of data, methods for finding desired knowledge in the blizzard of bits, Second Life, and the emergence of Digital Natives—those humans who have grown up immersed in the digital technology and who live on it as we do on air. He called them not omnivores but infovores and they demand to be fed. It reminded me of the flower in the movie, “Little Shop of Horrors” where a carnivorous flower demands ever more insistently to be fed. Now!

Yesterday, there was a similar lecture at Haas where Julien Decot, (movie) the Principal Strategist at Skype spoke to a class. This was listed as an open lecture but everyone but me had a large place-card with their name which they put in a special slot in front of them. Here again I felt out of place without a place card. Oh, well, I decided to play the role of T-Bag and wing it as a super salesman but as everyone asked a question it fell upon me to do likewise. It must not have been too bad a question because it got a couple of minutes of reply. Decot was one of those truly smart people who can speak off the cuff with great depth and clarity and uncanny precision. As the lecture developed it became apparent that he was at the center of what is happening today in the world of technology. He is a personal friend of people like Bezos of Amazon and helped him set up that empire. His personality and style and intensity reminded me very much of Craig Mundie of Microsoft whom I spoke briefly to last month. And now that I think about it like all of these self made billionaires and other really important people that I have been going to some very small trouble to meet. These are the really cool people of the world! And I think I want to be there too.