Autumn 2007
October 2, 2007
Brian Behlendorf
Founder & CTO of Collab.net
Mr. Behlendorf was a co-founder of the Apache project, one of the first Open Source projects. As one of the leaders of the open source movement he was featured in Tom Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. In 1998, he founded CollabNet. CollabNet provides a web-based collaborative software development platform to over 1 million users.
October 9, 2007
Ann Winblad
Co-Founder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Ann has been in the software business for over 25 years. Starting as a system programmer. She co-authored the book Object-Oriented Software and written articles for numerous publications, including the Red Herring and Forbes. In 1989 with John Hummer, she co-founded the venture capital firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Hummer Winblad Venture Parnters was the first venture capital firm to focus exclusively on software investments. You might want to read an interview she did with Business Week a few years ago.
October 16, 2007
President and CEO of Taleo
Taleo provides on-demand talent management solutions for over 1,000,000 users located in 100 countries around the world. Taleo was founded in 1999 (then named Recruitsoft) and went public in 2005. Today they are over $100M in revenue. Michael will bring a unique perspective to the discussion, as he was formerly the Executive Vice President of Peoplesoft’s service business.
October 23, 2007
President and CEO of Kenexa
Kenexa is a leading end-to-end provider of software; proprietary content, services and process outsourcing that enable organizations to more effectively recruit and retain employees. Nooruddin (Rudy) Karsan co-founded Kenexa in 1987 as a recruiting service and thru both acquisition and divesture steered it to a successful IPO in 2005. Today they are over a $150M in revenue. Read his blog at http://blog.kenexa.com/blogdetails.aspx?u=4.
November 13, 2007
Samir Aora
Chairman and CEO of Glam Media
Glam Media is a fashion and lifestyle website targeted at women. They have more than 20 million unique visitors in the U.S. and more than 30 million worldwide. Prior to Glam Samir was the Chairman of Emode/Tickle, Inc, which was sold to Monster in June 2004. And prior to Tickle, Arora was the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of NetObjects, Inc, since its inception in November 1995 to 2001.
November 27, 2007
Hasso Plattner
Founder of SAP
In 1972, Hasso Plattner together with Dietmar Hopp, Claus Wellenreuther, Hans Werner Hector and Klaus Tschira, founded the software giant SAP AG. He has served as CEO and Chairman and is currently the chairman of the supervisory board. In October 2005, with a donation of 35 million USD, Plattner founded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. Students of varying disciplines have been charged with the development of user-friendly innovations.
December 4, 2007
Chairman and CEO of Dealertrack Holdings
DealerTrack’s biggest accomplishment has been its transformation from a pure-play business model focused on credit application transactions to an end-to-end sales and finance solution for automotive dealerships. Dealertrack started in 2001 as a joint venture of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co, AmeriCredit Corp. and Wells Fargo & Company. Mark O’Neill led them to their IPO in December 2005.