Once a year, it’s a sure bet that you can find Silicon Valley’s elite gathered all at one party. On Thursday night, top Valley entrepreneurs and investors gathered at the 13th annual SDForum awards event.
The SDForum, a technology-industry nonprofit, has been around for decades. Its awards are like the Oscars of tech, honoring people who it deems visionaries. This year’s event was held at the the chateau home of Kelly Porter of Woodside Capital. The place is about 90 years old. Porter bought it in 1999. He spruced it up over five years and it’s now a palatial estate that makes you feel like you’re in the midst of the French wine country. The whole point of buying it was sharing it for great events, Porter said. It was an elegant setting for the gathering of tech luminaries, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and their entourages.
This year’s event honored four visionaries: Arthur Patterson, cofounder of Accel Partners; Reid Hoffman, cofounder and executive chairman of LinkedIn; Brent Schlender, former Fortune editor and cofounder of Techonomy; and Chris Shipley, former executive producer of DEMO and CEO of Guidewire Group. The ceremony took place on this backyard lawn. I asked Porter if he rented the place out for kids’ birthday parties.
One of the highlights for me was a short chat with Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse and a variety of other tech innovations. He said he was excited about all of the new input devices for computers such as touchscreens. And he was quite pleased that Silicon Valley wasn’t so formal anymore; he noted how few ties there were in the audience.
Serial entrepreneur Heidi Roizen hosted the SDForum event in years past in her Italian villa. But she handed the baton this year to Kelly Porter, head of Woodside Capital. Roizen said she was headed to Scotland for five months to teach entrepreneurship.
Susan Lucas-Conwell had to work hard on pronunciation of a few tough names at the event. She is the chief executive of the SDForum and the who’s who list has to roll off her tongue.
Arthur Patterson, cofounder of Accel Partners, was one of the award winners. He said that Ram Varadarajan, chief executive of Arcot Systems, “laid it on thick” in his kind introduction of Patterson. But Patterson said his success at picking winners came from having “lots of turns at bat.” Among the sweet ones was a company that Tolerant Systems, a hardware company that gobbled up hundreds of millions in funding and had no end in sight. It used its last $1 million in cash to convert itself into a software company called Veritas, which later merged with Symantec in a $13.5 billion deal. The lesson: the patient backing of good entrepreneurs pays off.
Jeff Weiner, chief executive of LinkedIn, introduced award winner Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. Weiner said Hoffman was thoughtful, loves to mentor people, has a Midas touch with investments, and has made a big impact in philanthropy with his backing of nonprofit company Kiva. Of course, Hoffman is executive chairman of LinkedIn, making him Weiner’s boss, so Weiner has to say nice things.
Reid Hoffman said he was honored and humbled to be in Silicon Valley at the center of the fulcrum for changing the world. Intrigued by what more could be done with the Silicon Valley model, Hoffman challenged others to make the world a better pace.
Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck’s restaurant in Woodside, Calif., plays host every day to dealmakers who want pancakes. He had the most fabulous jacket in the place. I caught him chatting with Bill Draper about Francois Mitterand.
San Jose mayor Chuck Reed (center) showed up at the VIP reception to make a pitch for companies to expand into San Jose. He had to leave early to dedicate San Jose’s brand new $1.3 billion airport terminal.
Bill Gates sent a video introducing Visionary award winner Brent Schlender, head of Techonomy. He joked that Schlender’s movie script, Killer App, ensured that he would have a journalism career, not a script-writing career. But Gates also said his favorite interview among dozens he did with Schlender was a joint interview with Steve Jobs at Jobs’ home in 1991. It was, Schlender said, like an interview in a college dorm room.
Former Fortune writer and cofounder of Techonomy Brent Schlender talked about how he felt fortunate to be a conduit for Silicon Valley’s visionaries. He noted how Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo as a map for the web. Then they had a visionary insight when they saw that Yahoo told them so much about people and that Yahoo in fact was a market research powerhouse. Schlender said that he admired a quote from economist Brian Arthur, who said, “If you aren’t confused, you don’t understand anything.” Schlender said that if he could write another book, it would be called “Manging Confusion,” which is what the best managers teach themselves to do.
Chris Shipley told how she took over the DEMO conference after she criticized it before DEMO founder Stewart Alsop, who challenged her to do it better. She also joked that constructive criticism is good, but she loves to avoid it. After investor Roger McNamee told her that DEMO still needed a makeover, Shipley decided to turn it into a debutante’s ball. It turned into a successful 13-year run. She is now CEO of the Guidewire Group. (Disclosure: VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall is now executive producer of DEMO).
Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher gave away copies of his book (compiling his Silicon Valley Watcher blog columns) at the event. He is on the left, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken is on the right, and John McIntyre of Enterprise Ireland Silicon Valley is in the middle.
Accel’s Rich Wong on the right with two partygoers. The middle one is Deep Nishar, vice president of products at LinkedIn.
