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A Place of Ideas: Renaissance Weekend Day One

August 30, 2008

I’m in Aspen, Colorado for an inspiring gathering over Labor Day Weekend. It’s Friday night at 10pm and the dance floor is calling–but I am driven to write first and dance later.

The gathering is called Renaissance Weekend, started by Ambassador Phillip Lader and Linda Lader in 1981. I first heard of the Weekend on my way to the Orlando airport in 2006 while serendipitiously sharing a taxi with former U.S. Congressman Martin Lancaster, the current President of the NC Community College System.

We were on our way back from the National Association of Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) conference. He told me how the weekend gatherings, originally in Charleston, SC over New Year’s and now in Aspen, Tuscon, and Monterey, brought together driven and accomplished people to discuss public policy, science, business, religion, and more.

I took a look at the site and saw past participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Gerald Ford, Evan Bayh, Howard Dean, Bill Richardson, Janet Napolitano, Lawrence Summers, Ted Turner, Steve Case, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Colbert, and North Carolinians Terry Sanford and John Sall.

I wanted to go, but had no way in.

I heard nothing more of this gathering for two years, until this June when my friend Stever Robbins gave me a call. He nominated me to attend and wonderfully I’m now here.

Today was the first full day of Renaissance. I must say from the first day that it has been a wonderful experience so far. One of the ways the Weekends are different than any other conference is that every attendee is assigned to present briefly (for 2 minutes to everyone and then for about 10 minutes in numerous breakout panels) on either what they know most about or what they are most passionate about. This practice enables attendees to hear from experts in their field ranging from astronauts to cosmologists to entrepreneurs to neurosurgeons. At this Weekend, there are about 300 attendees.

Today I was assigned to present for 2 minutes to the group on “An Immodest Proposal - If I Could: Serious and humorous proposals on policy, work, religion, and marriage.” I then participated on a panel with six others called “Why Not Change the World? Examples and Visions of Social Entrepreneurship & Community Service.”

At noon, I experienced the most intellectually stimulating hour of my life since the panel on global peace at Fortune Brainstorm with Jeff Bezos last month. My friend and venture capitalist Nick Beim from Matrix Partners moderated a panel called “Putin’s Czarist Plan: Is His Russion a Neo-KGB State” that I hope to post about next.

Tomorrow, Saturday morning, I’m presenting for 2 minutes at 9am on “When I’m 65 - A Red Bull Generation Envisions Their Professional, Personal, & Nation’s Future,” taking the afternoon off to go white water rafting for the first time in my life on the Colorado River, then returning for a 6pm discussion, “Must There Always Be a Bottom Billion: Promise & Pitfalls of Reducing Poverty, Supporting Social Entrepreneurs, and Assisting the World’s Less Developed Nations.”

As a short aside I’ll share a fun story. This visit is my first time in Aspen and the Aspen Institute since July 2006 for Fortune Brainstorm 2006. I recall then sitting next to John McCain for 10 minutes while watching the Germany-Italy World Cup game in the lobby of Aspen Meadows and then seeing him go to the back of the lounge to speak with Vinod Khosla, ostensibly about alternative energy. Thinking she was a passerby and not knowing then who she was, I asked Cindy McCain to take a picture of Senator McCain and I. She somewhat unwillingly oblidged, but alas, the camara battery was dead and no proof exists.

This is a place of ideas and action–action that leads to making a difference in the world. I’m fortunate to be here and look forward to sharing tomorrow night how the day goes.

From their site:

“With equally distinguished participants, all Renaissance Weekends foster lively exchanges which transcend ideological, political, economic and religious differences. This eclectic, non-partisan group - CEOs, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, Nobel Laureates and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, artists and scientists, admirals, astronauts and Olympic athletes, judges and journalists, volunteers, diplomats and work-at-home parents, Presidents, Prime Ministers, professors and priests, Republicans, Democrats and lots of Independents, innovators from across America and several nations - has become for many an extended family.”

The dance floor is calling my name…

Filed Under All, Conferences, Journal, Social Entrepreneurship, Speaking, Travel · 1 Comment  

At Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Half Moon Bay, CA

July 21, 2008


Today through Wednesday I am the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, about 45 minutes south of San Francisco. After a Segway tour along the Pacific this afternoon, the sessions began at 4pm. We’ve heard from Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, and Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit.

Here are some notes on what some of the panelists spoke about:

Dell

  • 500,000 people per day who come onto the internet for the first time
    large majority are outside the United States
  • Long term bull on the long term impact technology can have on society
  • Came back as CEO for second time
  • Put his ‘big ears’ on, listened to the employees
  • Thought of themselves as a company that listened
  • Will have about 2 billion conversations with our customers this year
  • centrally controlled tops-down is not most response way
  • We should have fiber to the home

Benioff

  • It’s not just company talking with customers, but customers talking with eachother in a one to many conversation
  • Customers are able to gang up on us
  • The acceleration of the soul of the world
  • Fareed Zakaria - Post-american World
  • The internet is the great accelerator in societal evolution
  • A change in the world can only happen if there is a change in conciousness
  • Dalai Llama - world peace comes through inner peace
  • web 1.0 - transact
  • web 2.0 - collaborate
  • web 3.0 - innovate (via platform)                                                         

Brad Smith, 5th CEO of Intuit in 25 years

  • 50 million end users
  • Connecting florists with florists in different zip codes
  • Intuit now 50% SaaS

Other livebloggers at the conference include:

Filed Under All, Conferences, Journal, Tech · 1 Comment  

At Get Altitude Conference in LA This Week

October 8, 2007

I am at Eben Pagan’s Get Altitude Conference this week in Los Angeles recommended to me by my friend Cameron Johnson a couple months ago. The majority of the attendees are CEOs and entrepreneurs who run companies between $1 million and $10 million in annual sales. The program is broken up into the sections of You, Your Market, Your Marketing, Your People, and Your Systems. I will be blogging from the event during the event and letting you know what I think about it. I have three pages of action items from the Day 1 content so far, so it’s off to a good start.

I’ve run into Carlos Garcia from Traffic Tactics and Jesse Lear from Young Wealth Weekly.

Eben runs a 85 person $25 million per year company called Double Your Dating, which is the category leader in the dating advice space, which ensures humorous anecdotes constantly flow through the advice. One panelist just quipped:

“Speaking of getting off, these chairs are really interesting for the bum.”

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Impact 2007 Conference on Social Entrepreneurship.

October 5, 2007

Tonight I attended a reception at Sullivan’s in Raleigh for tomorrow’s Impact 2007 conference on social entrepreneurship. The conference began in 2005 at MIT, moved to Stanford last year, and is being hosted by NC State this year and sponsored by the College of Management’s Entrepreneuship Education Initiative (EEI), Stanford’s BASES Social Competition, and MIT’s IDEAS Competition.

I met some fascinating people tonight including D.C. Jayasundera, a masters student from Sri Lanka currently attending Stanford studying water sanitation and engineering, Kyle Greer, a board member of the EEI and commercial real estate broker with Carolantic Realty, Mark Saad, a student at State who works in corporate sales at Rush Hour, a indoor high-speed go-kart racing facility in Garner, and Linda Planto, Associate Director of The Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center, a state-funded facility that works with researchers and technologists to help bring innovations to market in Mass. She and I had a interesting conversation about photovoltaic cells, coaxial cable-like solar reception devices (that enable the photons and electrons to move in the proper direction to maximize solar power efficiency), and the expected state of fusion power in 30 years. Some very smart people. I am glad such a conference is here in NC. I’m looking forward to attending tomorrow!



Filed Under All, Conferences, Entrepreneurship, Journal, Social Entrepreneurship · 95 Comments  

Clinton Global Initiative This Week in NYC

September 25, 2007

Dave Johnson, the author of the book Seeing the Forest, is blogging from the Clinton Global Initative conference in NYC this week. Check it out.

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