Salesforce, NASA and Noble Laureates

So Jimmy and I headed over to an event organized by Marc Benioff the CEO of Salesforce.com to launch his book on social entrepreneurship and to honor some of people featured in the book such as Peter Gabriel, Michael Dell and Alan Hassenfeld, CEO of Hasbro. It was a delight to see Peter and Alan getting well deserved respect. As I was leaving for dinner, for the first time, ran into Gavin Newsom who promised to come by our new office to officially “bless” it. The mayor, as always, was in great form.

On the way to dinner I stopped at the Accel Partners party…they always have the best wine, champagne and food…in a very beautiful modern art museum. But this year unlike the last few years they did not do it with Google who was having their own party later on that evening. Accel was a much smaller event as a result. And more on Google later.

Then it was on to a Davos dinner which for me was a real treat. The main guest, who was at my table, was Mike Griffin, the Director of NASA. The other guests were the Chief Scientifc Advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan and an old friend Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of Britain. Griffin was astonishing, candid, insightful, imaginative, open minded, (a bit arrogant), though willing to listen, and willing to admit that he got something wrong. And not at all like a typical bureaucrat. His vision is one of a space faring civilization and he doesn’t mean the US, he means humankind. He loves the idea of space based solar power, Stewart will be pleased to hear. He has funded some of the best innovative rocket technology like Elon Musk’s Space X. So for me this was a really exciting evening.

As it happens sitting next to me was another space buff, Abdullatif Al-Othman, the CFO of Saudi Aramco, someone I have worked with before. He was an excited fan too, but he also had very kind words about the impact we have had on Aramco and invited us back.

Then things got weird…
So after dinner I decided to go the Google party which was beginning at 10:30. After putting on my warm clothes to march back up the frozen hill to the Steignberger, I had not gotten twenty feet from the front door of the hotel when I was hijacked by HH Sheik Salman Al Kalifah, the Chairman of Bharain oil whom I’ve know for some time and mainly see here at Davos. He leaned in close and whispered urgently to me…”Shimone Peres is about to speak here at your hotel and I need to listen to him, but I can’t walk in there alone. If any of the Arab press see me I am in deep trouble, but I have to be there. Please take me in there so I can be anonymous.” So what could I do but turn around and take him in. The event was a night cap with several Nobel laureates including Joe Stiglitz, Ron Engle and Berkeley’ Steve Chu and soon to arrive Shimone Peres. But Peres got trapped at the Accel party and never showed. The speakers were great though. When Larry Summers who was interviewing them asked Joe Stiglitz “what is the one fallacy in the air around Davos that would undermine some common beliefs?” Joe, replied, “Only one?” And then went on to attack the discussion on the need for a new round of trade agreements. He argued that no deal is better than a bad deal. And the last round was a bad deal.” That would indeed be a very controversial position around Davos. At the end of the session the sheik salvaged his evening when I introduced him to Joe Stiglitz and he got to ask Joe about the future of oil and he replied…”biofuels!” And as it happened I had just introduced the sheik to Jay Kiesling, one of the leaders in synthetic biology whose new start up company will soon be focusing on bacteria to produce biofuels. The sheik immediately asked, can I invest as this is obviously the future. The sheik ended the evening by asking if we could help him deal with the security issues facing Bahrain. By then it was too late to head up the hill. So for me, even if I missed the Google party, perhaps something of value will flow from this, the Noble event was really interesting anyway and I was able to help an old friend.

Well that’s it for tonight