ELON MUSK – The Über Entrepreneur’s Next Ideas

04.09.09 | Category: Breaking News, Interaction Design, Power Zen, Valley Future

Drue Kataoka, Elon Musk and Bill Fenwick

You already know it all about the fabled “Über Entrepreneur” (as he was billed by the Churchill Club yesterday) Elon Musk. How he dropped out of the graduate program in Physics at Stanford after only two days, how he co-founded PayPal and was the largest shareholder when it sold to EBAY in 2002 for 1.5 billion, and all about his latest accomplishments and adventures with Tesla and SpaceX.

At ValleyZen we like to report on what we don’t know about yet, what’s new, what is in the imaginative space. In a Sumi-e painting that’s like the negative space, the space between brush strokes where all possibilities lie. People in Silicon Valley are comfortable with things that haven’t been defined yet and with what is uncertain. That’s exciting.

Yesterday we met with Elon and…

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CookFest 2009 in Silicon Valley

04.05.09 | Category: Unexpected

Drue Kataoka, Randy Zuckerberg, and Miri GutmanFast-paced action and friends took center stage at CookFest 2009 hosted by Wellsphere Co-Founder Ron Gutman and Miri Gutman. Digerati descended on the Gutman home to celebrate Wellsphere’s recent acquisition by Virginia-based HealthCentral with a homey homestyle digerati hoedown. The Zen of Process…It wasn’t a slick East coast styled cocktail party and sitdown dinner (although there were many friendly ex-New Yorkers there). Instead the day began with a communal trip to Whole Foods led by Ron and Miri. Next engineers and product designers alike pitched in to chop vegetables and talk about their startups.

Eight hours later…

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Obama White House and Collective Intelligence

04.02.09 | Category: Power Zen, Zen Government

Barack Obama
As world leaders meet at the G20 London Summit this week, ValleyZen reflects on the following. What if you had the responsibility to resolve simultaneous national and international crises that consisted of and were dependent on resolving a number of diverse smaller crises…

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