Event to give entrepreneurs a leg up
By Colleen Honigsberg
April 28, 2004 9:00 p.m.
For any students interested in a career in business, tomorrow
might offer a head start.
The Entrepreneur Association of UCLA Anderson School of
Management is putting on its annual Entrepreneur’s
Conference.
The conference is one of UCLA Anderson’s largest events,
usually enticing a crowd of hundreds of students, alumni, staff and
local business leaders.
Tomorrow’s event, entitled “The Evolved
Entrepreneur” is expected to draw over 350 people.
The conference comes on the heels of the Financial Times’
third annual ranking of the UCLA Anderson School as the No. 1
entrepreneurship school worldwide.
“The conference is the hallmark event of the Anderson
calendar, and the event that puts the school on the map,”
said Nishen Radia, an Anderson MBA candidate and board member of
the Entrepreneur Association.
The keynote speakers for the conference are Marc Benioff,
chairman and chief executive officer of salesforce.com, and Linda
LoRe, president and CEO of Frederick’s of Hollywood.
Salesforce.com is a company that provides Web-based applications
to consumers in place of traditional software. The company is
currently going public in one of the most exciting initial public
offerings of 2004.
Frederick’s of Hollywood, a lingerie company, has also
enjoyed recent success. It experienced a Chapter 11 reorganization
in 2000 but has since had its largest growth period in more than 10
years.
There will also be 18 panel discussions on topics ranging from
“It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Business of Wireless
Hotspots,” to “Show Me the Money: Starting a Financial
Services Business,” to various workshops on issues such as
negotiation.
The conference will run from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Tickets are
available online until 5 p.m. today or at the door and are $55 for
students. General admission tickets are $200.
Marc Lebovitz, president of the Entrepreneur Association, said
he hopes the event will draw people from all backgrounds that are
interested in entrepreneurship.
“The conference is designed to help entrepreneurs
build successful organizations. This year’s theme focuses on
preparing business leaders to compete in today’s
entrepreneurial environment where funding is on the rise but a
careful strategy is necessary,” he said.
With the end of the last two economic generations, the dot-com
boom and bust, the economic environment has changed, said Henry
Lee, a board member of the Entrepreneur Association. The
conference will focus on how to be successful in this new economic
climate. Â
Lee added that the keynote speakers will have lots of insight in
this arena because both have enjoyed unusual business successes in
the new economic environment.
Another board member, Jade van Doren, also noted that successful
entrepreneurship is especially important for Americans to continue
to pursue. Doren said other countries have outdone the United
States in traditional factors of production such as land, labor,
entrepreneurship and capital.
“A lot of what you hear in the media “¦ relates to
what competitive advantage the U.S. will have in business ““
it must be entrepreneurship,” he said.
For more information on tomorrow’s event, please visit
http://www.uclamba.com/eac/index.htm.
