Some lucky inspiring meetings
Lunch with Woz!
On a trip to Silicon Valley in 2004, we were lucky that somehow Steve Wozniak ended up inviting us to lunch at his favorite restaurant, Hobee’s.
Spent a couple of hours listening to his crazy stories and he also pranked us with a green laser pointer.
A week with NNT in 2017
Got a chance to take the RWRI weeklong class with Nassim Taleb in 2017. People who never met Nassim in real life think he’s an aggressive bully because he fights orgs/people on Twitter (Monsanto, State dept IYIs, sloppy economists, Phil the rat Tetlock, Steven Pinker, Richard Thaler,….). But Nassim is incredibly nice offline and online to people with good intentions and not trolling or nitpicking.
A class with Bill Campbell and Randy Komisar
During that same trip to Silicon valley in 2004 we attended a class at the Stanford GSB with with guest visitor Bill Campbell (The “Trillion Dollar Coach”) with Randy Komisar of Sequoia as the instructor. All we knew then that he was chairman of Intuit and didn’t even take a photo with him! Randu took us to his office afterwards and signed our copies of “The Monk and the riddle”
Bill Gates and others 2008-2010
A few weeks after arriving to the HBS campus in 2008, Bill Gates came for a speech to we tackled him and had his bodyguard take a group photo (and switching it with his fat finger to a mode that made it blurry!). Over the coming two years dozens of interesting people came to camus from Ferran Adria to Bob Iger and sat down in our class listening to us patiently for an hour about how we would have made better decisions than them and then wrapping up the class in the last 20 minutes.
Murray Gell-Mann 1999
Met Murray Gell-Mann in 1999 at an event and had printed a quote of him for his autograph. Someone with him recommended he doesn’t do his original signature because it was a loose piece of paper! He wrote his name.