From Science to Serial Entrepreneurship (or Intrapreneurship)

As we formulated the agenda for our upcoming meetup, two of the topics that we wanted to cover were:

• How do you cross over, so to say, from doing research in HPC to being part of a small and growing company?
• What are the pros and cons of working for a big company vs a small company vs a startup within a big company vs going it alone and forming your own company?

We are fortunate to have two speakers who not only have extensive and personal experience with these topics but are known worldwide as superb public speakers with in-depth of knowledge of technologies and markets.

Wolfgang Gentzsch is well known to the HPC community and a great example of entrepreneurial spirit.  Wolfgang was a professor of computer science and mathematics at several universities in the US and Germany before he founded HPC software companies Genias and Gridware in the 90s. He joined Sun Microsystems when Gridware was acquired by Sun in 2000, a successful acquisition that led to the well-known distributed cluster workload and management system Grid Engine.

He is now co-founder and president of the UberCloud Community and Marketplace for engineers and scientists to discover, try, and buy computing on demand, in the cloud.  Previously, he was Advisor to the EU projects EUDAT and DEISA, directed the German D-Grid Initiative, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Grid Forum, and of the US President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, PCAST. Wolfgang has held leading positions at the North Carolina Grid and Data Center in Durham, the DLR German Aerospace Center in Gottingen, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasmaphysics in Munich. He continues to serve as the Chairman of the International ISC Cloud Conference series. Follow him on Twitter: @wolfgent.

Karl Freund is a recognized expert on low-power servers and the emergence of ARM in the datacenter, but many of you would also know him from the time he was VP Marketing at Cray Research. Karl has personal experience working at large and startup companies. He is currently VP Marketing for server products at AMD, building power-efficient and high performance processors for servers. His startup experience includes Calxeda, which led the use of ARM processors for high performance servers. Karl’s background also includes RISC and Mainframe systems. He has extensive experience as a global marketing executive at IBM where he was VP Marketing, including integrating the Tivoli brand into IBM, and HP where he was a Division Marketing Manager, including integrating Apollo into HP. Follow him on Twitter: @karlfreund.

We couldn’t have asked for better speakers to share with us their entrepreneurial journeys, answer our questions, tell us what they have learned, and what advice they would have for us.