Churchill Club 2.0

I recently accepted a seat on the Board of Directors of the Churchill Club. I was flattered to be asked to get involved with what I consider to be a wonderfully important organization and took the opportunity to reflect upon why I cherish my time at Churchill events.

Put simply, during the last bull market, good insight was hard to come by. No one was really blogging yet and podcasts were not to be found. While there were a host of cool tech magazines then, their content was certainly more oriented toward feature articles and lacked the spontaneity of intellectualism and debate the hallmark this region.

So, if you were a relative peon (not sure I had even graduated to peon status then, or now), but wanted to hear firsthand the raw thoughts and reactions of the men and women who were shaping the future of technology, you had two basic options available to you. You could essentially scrap your way into the room as a fly on the wall where the titans of tech were doing the cutting edge analysis and making the decisions that would impact us all, or you could go to the Churchill Club and see these luminaries in an engaging dialogue and then likely talk to them in person afterward.

The first option essentially involved being the human embodiment of the oft-cited premise "shit rolls downhill" as an associate in a law firm or an investment bank. In exchange for yielding any sense of purpose for a life entirely qualified by a time-clock and my billable achievements, I was infrequently granted the privilege of catching glimpses of the names and faces who were making Web 1.0 happen. Countless hours of flailing about in judicial gruel would provide the occasional fortune to experience John Doerr and his counterparts ruminating on the future of the Net. As entertaining and valuable as those interactions were, this was not a very predictable nor scalable method.

In contrast, I relished the opportunity to attend Churchill Club events. It was there that I could see a gaggle of these superstars all in one place, delving into frank and robust conversations about exciting and relevant topics. No filters. No editors. Just dialogue and exploration. Then, for the ambitious and enterprising, there was always the opportunity to lurk by the side of the stage and catch the featured guests before they left. There I would stand among many, business card holstered for easy withdrawal in the event it was requested, elevator pitch on the tip of my tongue, poised to convince them why they should spend two minutes interacting with a baby-faced loser who still owed six figures worth of law school loans and would soon be back at his desk collating the documents for a shareholder mailing.

Those were wonderful nights. I vividly remember running an idea by Vinod Khosla, getting some advice from Guy Kawasaki, and being intellectually humbled in a spontaneous hallway debate with Dan Gillmor. I will also never forget seeing Mike McCue's live demonstration of TellMe Networks over five years ago (it totally worked), nor the intensity of the tempest that is Steve Ballmer. (In fact, I loved these events so much that in the time after I left my law firm, and its regular paychecks, and was scraping by as an entrepreneur, I used to sneak into Churchill Club meetings through the side door. Shhhh.)

Yet, since those days, the entire tech community has evolved to be one of information access and sharing. Countless VCs blog their first-person thoughts (Brad Feld and Fred Wilson are among many I love) and my feedreader is bursting at its AJAX seams with insights and shared knowledge.

In that light, it has been particularly cool to see the Churchill Club evolve as well. Churchill continues to be a uniquely high quality venue for convening the brightest minds and talents from the realm of technology (excepting, of course, my recent appearance on a Churchill panel). It's also one of the best places around to meet and greet like-minded folks and accomplish a little networking. However, I am most excited to see how the Churchill Club is podcasting its events so that people far and wide can be entertained and enlightened by the discourse.

Let me know if you have any other ideas as to how Churchill can continue to grow and adapt. In the meantime, I hope to see you at an upcoming Churchill event soon.

 

Comments

[Robert Bole]

Chris --
I wish we had a Churchill Club in Portland. It seems that the ability to push ideas and view points is the hallmark of great communities and the strength of our democracy.

To often the civil discussion forums of cities are mired in the "good government" movements of the 1920s/30s/40s. It is clear that the issues of those (these)times are unfortunetly still with us, there is no natural home for the horizon issues that the Churchill Club is founded upon.

On a side note -- with your unique view of being on the seam of the market/government it would be interesting to for the Club to consider the question of "public purpose" within the question of innovation and technology growth. Invite me to that discussion.

[Ben Casnocha]

Congrats! I will have to get more active. I've only been there once -- and that was when I spoke at their Leadership Defined event which turned out to be so-so.

Keep us posted on what's going down.

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