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November 23, 2004

A Great Day in Palo Alto!

This morning I found myself in a classroom at the Stanford Business School which was discussing the ‘business’ of VoIP. The professors had prepared what I believe to be the first business case study on VoIP at a major university. The case study itself focused on AT&T, Vonage and Free World Dialup. The case study itself will be available in the near future. I believe it will be appearing in a book co-authored by Andy Grove.

The class was a wonderful experience for me. I got to witness how fresh minds view what I have been trying to do for the past decade. While I was mostly trying to impart my experience to the class, I was secretly hopeful that the Stanford MBA candidates (not to mention their noted professors including Les Vadasz, one of the first Intel employees and a true pioneer) might give me some fresh insights into the future direction of VoIP. Although I don’t think I got any epiphanies, it was a fascinating give and take with the students and helped me to look at VoIP with fresh eyes.

After class, I was the invited guest speaker at the Stanford High Tech Club “brown bag” lunch.

After the Q&A with students I was invited to meet Dave Neeleman, CEO of jetBlue who by coincidence was also speaking at Stanford today. This certainly would have been an unexpected pleasure for me, and one of the great highlights of a great trip. For those of you who are regular readers of my blog, you are no doubt aware that I am a huge fan of jetBlue and have been trying to figure out how to promote the company and perhaps find ways to work with jetBlue. I, however, ended up getting sidetracked by a few inquisitive students (which was interesting itself), but I missed the opportunity to meet the jetBlue CEO or so I thought.

But now, it seems, I have been given a reprieve. When I got to the San Jose airport to check-in for my jetBlue flight home, it turned out that the jetBlue CEO will be taking the redeye with us back to New York. He is a person I’ve been wanting to meet for awhile. jetBlue’s obviously a much different business model than what VoIP offers but a rather interesting model in it’s own right. The CEO seems to be an interesting person in his own right.

I hope to find some common ground with him on the flight tonight since while he doesn’t know this, I consider myself one of jetBlue’s biggest fans. :-)

Posted by jeff on November 23, 2004 11:44 PM | Permalink

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Comments

Oh man...being lucky really IS OK!

Posted by: K² at November 24, 2004 03:33 AM