I got back last night from the 2005 Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization conference in Orlando. I drove down with Phil Gennett, the new president of the Carolina Entrepreneurship Club. Let's just say there's nothing quite like driving a Nissan 350z across Florida with the top down.

This year's conference was my fourth and one of my favorites. Although Navy Pier in Chicago has been nice the past two years, it's always good to go back to Florida and hang out at the pool between sessions. At this year's conference I spoke twice--once on Friday morning and once on Saturday. I spoke Friday to about 140 students and to about 60 on Saturday on the topic "How to Build a Company to $1 Million in Sales: Before You Graduate." You can download my presentation from the conference here.

Greg Jones of uBid fame gave quite a inspiring speech Friday evening. It really motivates me to think the guy built a company from nothing to $1 billion in valuation in 9 months and gave Merrill Lynch one of it's biggest IPOs in its history. I think I'm just going to shut up until I've taken a company public with a $1B or higher valuation. If only it were 1997 again.

One event at the conference that stood out was the elevator pitch competition. This competition was definitely the best one I've seen so far--in terms of quality of the pitches as well as the entertainment value. It was clear that a number of the presenters had spent a lot of hours preparing. I especially liked the eco-friendly worm-fertilizer idea and the idea of the winner--to create a business that provided an organized tour for college business students of 25-30 businesses across Europe and Asia over a few week period.

The highlight of the conference for me, however, was hearing Steve Wozniak speak on Friday night. He shared the story of how he created the Apple I and Apple II and created the first computer game as software. I previously didn't know that at one point, simple games like Pong were actually "hardware" hard coded onto physical chips. For a moment, Wozniak really made me wish that I had been born in 1960 and had the opportunity to have been a part of the microcomputer and then the early Internet revolutions. I quickly got solace, however, from the realization that being born in 1984 will in the end likely present even more opportunities.

It's truly amazing what people like Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and others did in their 20s during the 1970s and 1980s. I wonder what my generation (the 1980s generation) will accomplish in the next two decades now that the "world is flat" and the fiber optic and digital frameworks are in place. Those guys built the world of 1995. Now it's our turn to build the world of 2025. I can only wonder what impact on the economy, technology, innovation, and job creation the 800 attendees of this year's CEO conference will have over the next two decades. It will certainly be interesting to see.

Overall, from my vantage point the conference went very well and was an inspiring as ever. Thanks to Jean Walsh, Joanna Wolek, the UIC team, Gerry Hills, John Hughes, Michael Hennessy and everyone else for pulling it off for us again! If you've never been and are still in college, I'd definitely recommend checking in out in October 2006. Just stay tuned to the CEO web site for details.