Autumn 2009

Bruce Chizen, former President & CEO, Adobe

As one of the few executives to have successfully competed with Microsoft, Bruce has a unique perspective on the future of the high tech industry and what it will take to succeed. While he left Adobe after a successful seven year run, he has more recently joined the Board of Oracle Corporation and engaged with a select group of private equity and venture capital players. He might even talk about why Adobe should have been the ones to release the Kindle.

Erich Clementi General manager, IBM Cloud Computing (NYSE: IBM)

IBM signaled that cloud computing is much more than a buzz word when in February of this year Erich Clementi was put in charge of the business reporting to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano. With global revenues of $100B, and still the prefered supplier to many of the world's largest businesses it'll be interesting to understand more of how this significant move could play out.

Lars Daalgard, President and CEO, Successfactors (NASDAQ: SFSF)

As one of the last companies to make an initial public offering before Depression 2.0 hit, Lars brings his unique style and convictions to Successfactors. The company recently won a very high-profile global contract from Siemens for 420,000 seats, which should further strengthen its position as having more users than any other SaaS company.

Vic Gundontra, Vice President, Engineering Google (NASDAQ: GOOG

Vic joined Google in 2007, after a one-year delay due to a Microsoft employee non-compete agreement. His responsibilities as Vice-President of Engineering include Google's mobile phone applications, and its developer efforts, including OpenSocial, Google Gadgets, Google Gears, and Android. As our only Engineer in the seminar series he'll have particular insights in the challenges of developing software for the cloud.

Reid Hoffman, Executive Chairman and co-Founder, LinkedIn

Reid graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in symbolic systems and is our only lecturer this quarter who represents a private company.Reid was LinkedIn’s founding CEO for the first four years before moving to his role as Chairman.. He is a member of the board, investor and mentor to many of the most prominent social networking companies.

Jeffrey Jordan, President and CEO, Opentable (NASDAQ: OPEN)

While many are debating if the recession has ended Jeff led a successful initial public offering for Opentable. Ending a 15-month drought — the longest in memory — the company made the IPO in May of this year. Jeff will have plenty to say about what it takes to be successful in a software-powered business targeting the consumer.

Randy Spratt, Executive VP, CIO & CTO, McKesson (NYSE: MCK)

With health care and health care reform so much in the news. And with the level of spending on software and hardware technology traditionally low in the health care industry, Randy's comments and insights could not be more timely. For those of you who don't know McKesson was founded in 1833, based in San Francisco and today is over $100B in revenue.