Listening to interesting people this week!

This week I had the opportunity to listen to three, rather good speakers and this highlights the joy of coming back to college, the level of intellectual stimulation is so high, that its incredible.

Ofcourse, I would have posted this earlier, but the mid terms kinda held me back a little.

 

Speaker 1: Finance minister of India: P Chidambaram (an HBS alum too)

This is a man who is in charge of the budget of the entire nation of India. This is a man, who in India is surrounded by 100 cops and is completely inaccessible. This is also the man with whom we shook hands and quizzed him on the logic of subsidizing oil in an economy. The opportunity to meet him at a SCID (http://scid.stanford.edu/) presentation, with less than 75 people around was incredible. The man spoke about the plan of the nation, its challenges and options for the future. Ofcourse, as can be expected with politics, not everything he said was unbiased and clean, but the opportunity to meet this man face to face, in such a small gathering was great (yes, there was a lottery thingie to get in, I got lucky cos it was one day before the mid-terms and a lot of people dropped out) You can watch his presentation on the link above too.

 

Speaker 2: Azim Premji, CEO Wipro

This was a man, who had to go back from his Stanford undergrad back to India, when his father died and he had to take over the family business of manufacturing vegetable oil. Two decades later, he transformed that company into one of the largest software/BPO firms in India, which is growing at the rate of 35% a year! While he was not the best of presenters, he gave us some incredible insights into the transforming nature of the India economy and what the hard facts where.

 

Speaker 3: Dr. Eli Harari, CEO Sandisk

This was a man, who had never fished in his life. But after graduating from Princeton, with a PhD. In solid state physics, decided to make a new type of fishing rod. The idea failed and his wife urged him to focus on his core skills. It worked ! Turns our that the topic of his thesis was the basis of flash memory technology. And the rest if history ofcoure….

He spoke at great length about his success and failures (this man was 43 when his last company failed, so he was not a young upstart)

 

The bottom line, these presentations are so intellectually stimulating and refreshing that it would suck to leave college in two years, and not have the opportunity to access such high quality forums again

 

Ash