On September 13, Mind the Bridge hosted a policy hackathon sponsored by Dell at the MTB Innovation Center in San Francisco. The Dell PolicyHack™ brought together entrepreneurs and U.S./EU policy experts to solve policy challenges. The goal is to productively brainstorm and to provide top-line thinking that can inspire and serve as basis to develop and implement full policies.
My team was formed by:
Sara R. Klucking (Section Chief, Innovation & Programs, Office of Science and Technology Cooperation, US Department of State) Bogdan Ceobanu (Policy Officer, Startups & Innovation, European Commission) David Hodgson (CEO, Hummingbird Labs) me The five teams had 75 minutes to come up with a policy solution to issue areas that impact entrepreneurs.
After the trip to Boston I came down with the flu, of course on a weekend as usual. So Monday I had zero energy, but a week ahead with an usual large number of meetings around London, so I had to do “magic calendar tricks” to be able to make all of them and to also attend several events. The main “trick” is to concentrate meetings geographically, adding into the calendar the time it takes to go from point A to point B.
On Wednesday and Thursday, I was invited to attend the Amazon Web Services Summit in London’s Excel center.
Besides an exhibition area with many vendors (some of them already suppliers to my company) like NewRelic, DataDog, GitHub, Chef, Alscient, Teradici, DataPipe, Ruxit, CloudCheckr, Amazon Activate, Elastic, Redis, etc, all with their great swag (mostly t-shirts and stickers, but lots of giveaways, from drones to iWatches), the highlight was the conference sessions.
On Thursday, I was invited to attend the E2Exchange Annual National Reception at Banking Hall (London)
It started as a fun networking evening event, where I met all kinds of people, from VCs, to the owner of a large bank, to PR specialists… even a hypnotherapist!
Some politicians, like The Secretary of State for Business, had confirmed their attendance and were scheduled to debate Brexit, but they cancelled at the last minute due to the terrible murder of Jo Cox.
Yesterday I was invited by KPMG UK to be a guest speaker at their Health Get Together event.
It was a pleasure to be invited to participate in their internal event. It gave me an inside look at how consultants work, and I also had a chance to listen to a very interesting internal presentation about their social media use.
Tuesday March 1 I had a conversation with Dr. DJ Patil, the First White House Chief Data Scientist, at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.
He was interested in discussing ways in which the White House can help healthcare technology companies like mine. The first issue I raised was my concern over the FBI’s request for Apple to decrypt a suspected criminal’s iPhone.
My position in this issue is well known: weak encryption means weak security for ALL of us, so nobody can request weak security for security’s sake.
Walking towards my London Shoreditch office
to meet the Swiss investor and his impeccable suit,
leaving the City bankers’s coffee-holding fast pace behind,
I notice the absence nobody seems to
Where did he go?
His sleeping sack and pillow still on the sidewalk
as annoyingly positioned in the corner as always
But he’s gone
.
I wonder and I worry
his failing body, almost as absent as his lost gaze
