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Events today and Palo Alto Geek dinner

Today there is a bunch going on around my hood.

Today’s Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders session features Bill Campbell, former CEO and current Chairman at Intuit and Danny Shader, CEO/Pres of Good with an hour’s talk entitled “From Start-Up to Success: Lessons in Growing a Company”. It starts at 4:3o over at Terman Auditorium and is free. Niall says Campbell’s on the dock for his role in mentoring the Google gang as a been-there-done-that guy. Should be an interesting talk.

Then there’s a bake off:

• SDForum has Paul Graham at PARC speaking on How to Sell a Startup - but don’t let the generic title fool you. As Adam Rifkin points out on the 106Miles blog, this isn’t same-old-same-old: this is a new model of product development and market expansion. This has snacks starting at 6, goes until 9 or so and is $15 members/$25 nonmembers. I’m headed over to hear Paul’s pragmatic take in favor of what traditional startup theory rails against: tooling your startup for a flip. He’s one of my favorite not-bloggers - proving some things deserve a longer expositon. His essays are among the best out there - though strangely out of synch with the feed model. He should enable his site with feeds - I run into the same trouble keeping an eye out for new stuff that aggregators solved. Good thing others pick new pieces up pretty quick. You can get the feed here.
• Harvard Business School and the Economist are cosponsoring a tech event, “Business 2010″ right down the road at SAP. This one gets you dinner along with the punditry, but has a more fuzzy futurist bent (that’s actually what I’m moving away from, yay me!). It’s $25 with dinner from 6-8:30.

Then a bunch of us - split up by the quandary of too much interesting stuff to do - will meet back up for food (the SDF hors d’oeuvre-challenged folk) and libations at Il Fornaio. They serve till 11, and are equally happy to dish out pizzas, real food, espresso, vino, or desserts. This will happen about 9, with some of us filtering in later. Even if you’re staying in, feel free to come out for some snacks and chatter.

Update: I’ve got a reservation at Il Fornaio under Eleanor. See you there.
Update 2: Paul has a feed. Yay.