Lessons of Technology Disruption
Speaker Series: Scott McNealy
Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Wayin
Co-Founder, Former Chairman/CEO, Sun Microsystems
Breakfast, Tuesday, 27 October 2015, 07:45-9:15, China Club
How to Avoid Getting “Ubered”
Event Details:
The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong is pleased to invite you to breakfast with Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of Silicon Valley’s earliest pioneers and visionaries of today’s multi-device, multi-platform connected environment.
McNealy’s guiding principle at Sun was “Without choice, you have no innovation. Without innovation, you have nothing” and coined the company’s marketing slogan, “The Network Is The Computer“, reflecting his vision of an integrated networked world. He predicted in the 1990s that “software will all go free,” and perhaps equally famously said around the same period, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” The name “Sun” was derived from the Stanford University Network (“S-U-N”) computer project.
McNealy was long skeptical of devices that were not part of networked environments and larger platforms. With regard to the iPod, he famously observed at its launch, “There’s a pendulum thing where stuff is on the client side and then goes back into the network where it belongs…..I guarantee you it will be hard to sell an iPod five or seven years from now when every cell phone can access your entire music library wherever you are.”
At Wayin, he is now bringing this same vision to re-write the rules of how businesses use, engage with and mobilize social media.
Wayin, which has raised almost USD 50 MM to date, is a pioneer in real time digital marketing and seeks to give brands control over their social data by creating real time consumer experiences. Wayin allows companies to create social hubs of content aggregation from from Facebook, Twitter, Vine, YouTube and Instagram (videos, polls, trending topics, heat maps, etc) for real time customer interaction and feedback.
Wayin is one of the few companies that has access to the “Twitter firehose”, working with everyone of the billions of tweets published on Tiwtter every day. Stanford University’s web site was an early adopter of the technology, as were the National Hockey League’s LA Kings and the NFL’s Denver Broncos. Other clients include The Weather Channel, Adobe and Hewlett-Packard. Earlier Wayin investors include the co-founder of SAP, the former CEO of Motorola and Larry Sonsini, the well-known Silicon lawyer, as well as US Venture Partners.
How does Scott see the Wayin business model evolving? What lessons does he draw from his experience at Sun? Where does one of the world’s great visionaries of the networked envornment see social media going, overall, not just in the context of Wayin, but in terms of personal use and engagement?
The Stanford GSB Chapter of HK could not be more honored to have Scott share his insights, experience and wisdom on his extraordinary professional and personal journeys. We hope you can join us.
Speaker’s Bio: Scott NcNealy
Scott McNealy is Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Wayin (a new generation app-form of digital ad company), Co-Founder & Board Member at Curriki (a global education and learning community) and past co-founder & CEO of Sun Microsystems.
McNealy is perhaps most famous for his 22 years at Sun which he co-founded with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim. Under McNealy’s leadership, Sun grew from a Silicon Valley start-up to a leading provider of network computing infrastructure with 37,900 employees worldwide, all while positioning the Company as the model of corporate integrity. In 1986, McNealy took Sun public, creating one of the most notable publicly traded technology companies. Under McNealy’s leadership, Unix and Java became industry standards, with the latter powering today more than 3.5 billion devices. McNealy stepped down from CEO of Sun in 2006, prior to the Company being acquired in 2010 by Oracle for USD 7.4 billion.
Unlike many in Silicon Valley, Scott’s background was in economics (Harvard, 1976), with most of his work experience prior to joining Sun being in the automative industry (his father had been Vice Chairman of American Motors Corporation). McNealy often refers to himself as a “golf major” who wound up running a high-tech business.
Scott received an MBA from Stanford in 1980. He is an avid hockey player and a single digit handicap golfer. He commissioner of the Alternative Gold Association and makes regular appearances on Fox Business Channel. He is married and is the father of four boys (Maverick, Dakota, Colt and Scout). Maverick, the nation’s top-ranked college golfer, plays for….Stanford.