Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Bill Gross (Idealab) at Caltech

Went to a talk by Bill Gross (of Idealab, not Pimco) at the Caltech entrepreneur's club. Gross graduated in 1981 and is one of the most creative entrepreneurs in the world. Here's a great interview with him.

3 comments:

Al_Li said...

I have been reading In The Plex by Steven Levy in the past few days. Bill Gross is featured prominently in some part of the book. He pioneered several technology that predated Google. Goto originated paid search before Google's AdWords, but it committed the sin of mixing paid search with organic search, and forgot to file the patent for real-time auction and pay per click. LnkAds also predated AdSense. I visited IdeaLab a year ago. That place was funky like Rubicon Project and had a strange smell. I believe Old Town Pasadena was the location of the tittie bars Feynman frequented before its revitalization.

steve hsu said...

Gross is an amazing guy. When it comes to ideas for startups he may be the single most prolific entrepreneur in the recent era. He shares a lot of good insights in the interview I linked to.

When I was a student there was very little in old town except a couple of dive bars and obscure restaurants. We used to go to a place called Barney's to eat and watch the Lakers-Celtics finals. Last time I checked it was still in business. Don't know which bars Feynman went to but I remember him carrying a sketchpad around :-)

LondonYoung said...

I bot some speaker from his GNP store. In the days before the internet bubble I would often lament about all the "lost entrepreneurs" from my 1986 graduating class ... guys were were gonna write the killer word processor, or database, etc... only to see the market for software become a microsoft dominated nightmare. Gross kept at it an eventually made good. Kids getting out of school in 1986 did not confront the same world as those getting out a decade later!

Blog Archive

Labels