Blair in the Silicon Valley
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/15162564.htm
Seated around an arrangement of tables were Chambers; David Gardner, chief operating officer of Electronic Arts; Hector Ruiz, chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices; Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist for Google; Shantanu Narayen, chief operating officer of Adobe Systems; Jim Ward, president of LucasArts; Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems; John Hennessy, president of Stanford University; Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer; and Mark Hurd, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard.
The group had some unlikely advice for Blair. The key to Silicon Valley’s success, they said, was failure.”Each of us had one massive failure: a company we founded or an investment we made,” Narayen said after the lunch.”If you have taken a risk and you failed, you potentially become more interesting and more valuable because now you know something,” Schwartz agreed.
Schwartz, whose company was founded by Stanford University graduate students in 1982, said the relationship with the university did not end after the founders moved off campus. That connection continues to this day, and is one of many similar relationships that helps Stanford craft a curriculum that prepares its students to continuously come up with new technological breakthroughs.
