Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Time: 6:00pm-8:45pm
Location: Ericsson Executive Briefing Center
Building 200 - 200 Holger Way
San Jose, CA 95134

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The Silicon Valley Talent Footprint and the Importance of Highly Skilled Immigration

September 16, 2014 / 6:00PM – 8:45PM / Ericsson Executive Briefing Center, Building 200, 200 Holger Way San Jose, CA 95134

Silicon Valley, like so many communities across our country, has been built by immigrants. From Facebook to Google to Intel, immigrant-founded companies fuel employment, create American jobs, and boost our economy.

Despite the countless contributions of immigrants to our industry, our fundamentally broken immigration system continues to make it difficult (and sometimes impossible) for entrepreneurs to grow their companies here. We face startling shortages in STEM-related fields while thousands of talented, hardworking entrepreneurs are mired in red tape.

Stanford president John Hennessy, speaking at the 10th annual GROW awards, said he would staple an H1-B Visa Card to every STEM-related graduate degree if he could. Leaders in our industries realize increasingly that these structural problems need legislative solutions, and the tech community has the opportunity to advocate for those changes.

Immigration and visa reform are broadly popular initiatives. Unfortunately, our broken political system has prevented good solutions from becoming law. We know the answers—the question now is, how do we get our government to act?

Join us for a conversation about the intersection of tech and politics, lessons learned in the fight for Immigration Reform, and what it all means for the future of Silicon Valley.

 

OUR DISTINGUISHED PANELISTS

WEILI DAI
President and Co-founder
Marvell Technology Group

Weili Dai, president and co-founder of Marvell Technology, is one of the most successful women entrepreneurs in the world today. Widely considered a technology visionary, Weili is the only woman co-founder of a global semiconductor company, and since it began in 1995, she has helped Marvell’s rise to become one of the top semiconductor companies in the world. An active philanthropist and advocate for the better use of technology to improve the human condition, Weili leads Marvell’s global civic engagements, including a major partnership with One Laptop Per Child. For her contributions to technology, Newsweek named her among the “150 Women Who Shake the World,” Forbes twice named her one of the “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women,” and University of California at Berkeley selected her as the first woman commencement speaker at the College of Engineering graduation ceremony in May 2012.

Ms. Dai has also become a driving force in expanding access to technology in the developing world and an ambassador of opportunity between the US and China, particularly in the arenas of education and green technology.

SCOTT BARTON
Principal Preuss School at the University of California, San Diego 

JOE GREEN
Founder and President
FWD.usJoe founded FWD.us to organize and engage the tech community on issues of vital importance to America’s global competitiveness. Previously, he founded Causes and co-founded NationBuilder to realize his belief that social networks enable community organizing at a previously unknown scale. These two successful companies combine the best of traditional organizing with new technologies, making the tools of democracy more widely available and empowering people to become leaders.

Joe started in local politics by winning election to his local school board while he was still in high school. He went on to work on several other political campaigns at the local, state, and national level, including John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. He is a board member of the Salesforce Foundation.

DANIEL J. WARMENHOVEN
Former CEO
NetAppDaniel J. Warmenhoven – Former CEO of NetApp from 1994 to 2009 and Executive Chairman from 2008 to 2014. Prior to NetApp, Warmenhoven served as chairman, president, and CEO of Network Equipment Technologies, a telecommunications manufacturer. He is a veteran of Hewlett-Packard Company and IBM. Business Week named Warmenhoven as one of its “Top 25 Managers for the Year” in 2001, and he was selected in 2004 by Ernst & Young as a recipient of its National Entrepreneur of the Year award in the technology category. In 2004 he was inducted into the Junior Achievement Hall of Fame of Silicon Valley. He is a director of Bechtel Corporation, Aruba Networks, and Palo Alto Networks, and is a Trustee of Bellarmine Preparatory High School. Warmenhoven holds a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering with honors from Princeton University.

VIVEK WADHWA
Author
“The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent”Vivek Wadhwa is a Fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and Distinguished Fellow at Singularity University. He is author of “The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent,” which was named by The Economist as a Book of the Year of 2012. He was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as Top 100 Global Thinker in 2012. In 2013, TIME Magazine listed him as one of The 40 Most Influential Minds in Tech.

Wadhwa oversees research at Singularity University, which educates a select group of leaders about the exponentially advancing technologies that are soon going to change our world. These advances—in fields such as robotics, A.I., computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials—are making it possible for small teams to do what was once possible only for governments and large corporations to do: solve the grand challenges in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security.

In his roles at Stanford and Duke, Wadhwa lectures in class on subjects such as entrepreneurship and public policy, helps prepare students for the real world, and leads groundbreaking research projects. He is an advisor to several governments; mentors entrepreneurs; and is a regular columnist for The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal Accelerators, LinkedIn Influencers blog, Forbes, and the American Society of Engineering Education’s Prism magazine. Prior to joining academia in 2005, Wadhwa founded two software companies.

 

OUR DISTINGUISHED MODERATOR

MICHAEL MALONE
Author, Journalist, World-renowned Technology Writer

Michael S. Malone is one of the world’s best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world’s largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of nearly twenty award-winning books, notably the best-selling “The Virtual Corporation,” “Bill and Dave,” and “The Future Arrived Yesterday.” Malone has also hosted three nationally syndicated public television interview series and co-produced the Emmy-nominated primetime PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, “The New Heroes.” As an entrepreneur, Malone was a founding shareholder of eBay, Siebel Systems (sold to Oracle) and Qik (sold to Skype). Malone has three books being published in 2012: a history based around his Oklahoma Land Rush homestead, a centennial history of Eagle Scouts, and “The Guardian of All Things,” a major history of human and artificial memory. He has also embarked on a new history of Intel Corp. Malone holds an MBA from Santa Clara University, where he is currently an adjunct professor. He is also an associate fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University, and is a Distinguished Friend of Oxford.