You are listening to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and video clips of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

But let me first introduce President Hennessy.

All of you, of course, he is our fabulous leader here.

In fact, the reason we asked President Hennessy to kick this off is because he is a remarkable

entrepreneur leader of this amazing university.

But he isn't just an academic.

As many of you know, he also is a very successful

entrepreneur. He has been involved with founding many startup high-tech companies, and in fact

took time off to launch his own venture before then coming back to Stanford, and that certainly

didn't stop his career as he ended up propelling himself up to the president of the university.

And he's going to tell us about his insights, about being a leader in a fast-growing, dynamic

environment where you really need to be very entrepreneurial. So, President Hennessy.

Thank you, Tina.

Well, Tina asked me to talk about the whole issue of entrepreneurial leadership

and how I think about it.

So let me start by telling you what I think the biggest challenge is for a startup company in Silicon Valley,

for the intels and the Cisco's and the Microsofts of the world, and for the universities of the world.

And the biggest challenge is how do you nurture and grow innovation? Innovation is the

challenge that all small young companies face. It's the challenge that all universities face.

It's the challenge that big companies face. And you only have to look out there and see how important that challenge is.

How many big information technology companies, for example, continue to grow from one generation of technology into the next where something else dominates.

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