If you don’t speak Geek, you’re not a competent director.

Sponsored by the Stanford Rock Center for Corporate Governance and the National Association of Corporate Directors, Silicon Valley Chapter, Inc. (SVDX).

7:30 – 8:00am Continental Breakfast
8:00 – 9:30am Program

Have you heard of “Big Data,” but aren't sure what it really means (or how much it has to do with your industry)? Do you keep seeing articles about cyber-security, but couldn't describe the difference between SQL-injection and a brute-force (hacking) attack, if your life depended on it? Have you seen the Google self-driving car, but wonder how that could possibly matter to your company (especially in the next five years)? Are you, as they say, somewhat “technically challenged,” but good at what you do and feel content to rely on one of your fellow directors to be the digital media and/or technology guru for the board?

The average director is not technically sophisticated (even in places like Silicon Valley), and increasingly this might be a serious mistake — both for the director and the company and shareholders he or she serves. Whether this lack of technical sophistication might cause you to breach your duty of care as a director is now an emerging debate about how much directors really need to know about technology.

This review of how technologies are transforming security, pricing, logistics, production, innovation and customer service will give directors an idea about what is at stake as industries (even brick-and-mortars, agriculture, shipping and real estate) are recast by fundamental shifts in technology. In this session you'll learn something about the technologies at hand, a bit more about how they are transforming industries and quite a lot about director duties in light of these changes.

Speaker

Dan Siciliano is the faculty director of the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and a professor and associate dean at Stanford Law School. He is co-founder and a director of LawLogix Group, Inc. — a global software technology company named seven consecutive times to the Inc. 500/5000, ranked several times as one of the top 100 fastest-growing private software companies in the United States and named to the Hispanic Business 500 (largest) and Hispanic Business 100 (fastest-growing) for 2010 and 2011. After serving as CEO for more than a decade, Dan sold a majority stake of the company to PNC in 2012 and now serves as the executive chairman. At Stanford Dan teaches corporate finance, corporate governance and practice and the two-part Stanford venture capital series. His work has included expert testimony in front of both the US Senate and the House of Representatives. For 2009, 2010 and 2011 alongside leading academics and business leaders such as Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman and Carl Icahn, Dan was named to the “Directorship 100” — a list of the most influential people in corporate governance. He is the co-director of Stanford's Directors' College and serves on the board of the Silicon Valley Directors' Exchange. Dan's related areas of expertise include executive compensation, corporate compliance, the legal and social impact of autonomous (robotic) systems and corporate strategy. He has served as a governance consultant and trainer to the board of directors of dozens of Fortune 1000 companies and is an angel investor and consultant to several firms and companies in Silicon Valley, Hong Kong and Latin America.

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