Great Talks

This week has had its share of excellent talks. After 2 nights with Philip Glass (one “conversation”, one performance) I went to see three other eminent speakers.

The first was Martin Eberhard of Tesla Motors who make the Tesla Roadster, the world’s first electric sports car (it’s lighter than a 911 and does 0-60 in less than 4 seconds). He gave a great talk on how to start and run a successful start-up business as a part of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar Series. You can listen to his talk here. If you want to hear more just about every week, you can subscribe to the podcast (part of the reason I wanted to come to Stanford).

After that, I went to a full house lecture at the Law school given by Jimmy Wales, the guy who started Wikipedia. If you haven’t heard of or played with Wikipedia, it’s worth checking out. There’s a ton of information on just about every subject you can image, and if you disagree, you can always change it. That’s the beauty of the Wikipedia model. All of the content is created and edited by the users.

The third in an amazing series of talks was Jeffrey Katzenberg. A big time Hollywood guy who’s most recently been running Dreamworks animation, the makers of Shrek.

[Note: for the Internet neophytes the words that are a different color are links, clicking them will take you away from my site and give you more information from someone else. Many of the ones here link to Wikipedia, so seeing the founder talk was pretty cool.]