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Pasadena Startup CEOs & Founders Gather for “The Great Leap Forward”

By Andy Wilson — May 2, 2014

In collaboration with Silicon Valley Bank and Metacloud, Innovate Pasadena hosted a special mixer-turned-debate on April 10th, beginning with a presentation by Ananth Natarajan on "The Great Leap Forward." In addition to being on the board of Innovate Pasadena, Ananth is a physician and engineer who specializes in utilization of advanced technology to solve pressing clinical problems. He presented his narrative on the history and impact of computing—from the early punch card systems to mobile and cloud computing today. We were fortunate to have more than 50 local startup CEOs and founders in the audience.

In collaboration with Silicon Valley Bank and Metacloud, Innovate Pasadena (IP) hosted a special mixer-turned-debate on April 10th, beginning with a presentation by Ananth Natarajan on "The Great Leap Forward." In addition to being on the board of Innovate Pasadena, Ananth is a physician and engineer who specializes in utilization of advanced technology to solve pressing clinical problems. He founded Infinite Biomedical Technologies (IBT) in 1997 and served as the CEO for over ten years. Funding for the company was provided by the National Institutes of Health, which committed substantial capital to IBT for development of its high-risk, high-reward technologies. Ananth presented his narrative on the history and impact of computing—from the early punch card systems to mobile and cloud computing today. He traced key trends and the market performance of leading technology companies through each phase of the development of computing. We were fortunate to have more than 50 local startup CEOs and founders in the audience. Needless to say the presentation transitioned into a hearty debate about the role of Microsoft as technology leader and innovator. The clear conclusion was that if you could call the trends early and choose the winners then you were in a good position to earn extremely handsome returns in capital markets. A core imperative of IP's mission is to engage the full "innovation stack." We are excited to have been able to collaborate with Silicon Valley Bank and Metacloud on this lively event targeting founders/CEOs and look forward to doing similar events in the future. A special thank you to Ananth for providing an excellent presentation and "stoking the fire" of debate. As we hope is always case at IP events, the content was fascinating and only paralleled by the passionate dialog that followed. Thanks! - Andy
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