John Morgridge introduces Eric Benhamou at the 2007 State of the Valley Conference

In Silicon Valley, we are all familiar with the concept of entrepreneurship.  It has been the lifeblood of our success, and there are many shining examples of people who have shaped the Valley through their entrepreneurial efforts.  Eric Benhamou is the quintessential entrepreneur.  Throughout his career he has been a visionary and a risk-taker, a man who has recognized opportunity and pursued it without fear of failure as he led the development of great technology companies that have transformed Silicon Valley.

But we are here today to recognize Eric not for his business entrepreneurship, but for his work as a civic entrepreneur. The award is named for David Packard, the first civic entrepreneur in modern Silicon Valley, to honor a person who has made a difference by taking their entrepreneurial qualities and using them to build our community through collaboration, helping us to develop and organize our economic assets to build strong, resilient networks across the public, private and non-profit sectors.  Past winners have been individuals who think expansively about the region, who act on a keen sense of civic responsibility, who are willing to roll up their sleeves to solve complex problems that don’t have market solutions.  I can think of no person in the Valley who embodies those characteristics more than Eric.

And I’ve known Eric for a long, long time.  Perhaps not long enough to remember him as a young boy in Algeria, but for many years as a business competitor.  And we should not lose sight of the fact, as we are discussing here today Silicon Valley's role among the regions of the world, that, like many of the entrepreneurs who have built this Valley, Eric is foreign born.  One of the great competitive advantages of this region is that people come here looking for education, as Eric did at Stanford, and they stay to start the companies that are the source of our success.

But we were not simply competitors.  As you are aware, the technology industry is a cutthroat business, and during the expansion of the 1990s our companies fought tooth and nail for market share in the networking equipment market. 

It is a tribute to the kind of person that Eric is that, while we competed, we have built a personal friendship based on mutual respect.  We were part of the same American Leadership Forum class -- in fact, this photo of us appeared on the cover of the ALF 1995-96 Annual Report -- and, believe me, you really learn a lot about a person when you are depending on each other to get over a big rock.  I've learned that he is an entrepreneur, but he is a man of honor and integrity.  I am delighted to have been selected to present this award to him today.

Eric’s business career is well known.  He was a founder of Bridge Communications, and later, as CEO, he led the expansion of 3Com.  Here he is with the 3Com management team in 1998.

He later became CEO of Palm from 2001 to 2003.  He remains Chairman of the board of directors of both companies.  Today he is chairman and CEO of Benhamou Global Ventures, which invests and plays an active role in innovative high tech firms throughout the world.

But outside of his business interests, Eric has devoted himself more and more to how technology can be used to transform communities, focusing on Silicon Valley and Israel, but throughout the world.  In 1997, President Clinton appointed Eric to the President’s Information Technology Advisory Council, and in 2003 he was appointed to the Joint High Level Advisory of the US – Israel Science and Technology Commission.

He has devoted much of his civic entrepreneurial efforts toward Israel.  He founded the Israel Venture Network, a venture philanthropy group of high-tech entrepreneurs and business executives from Israel and the US, focusing on scalable, systemic solutions for the social, educational and employment crises that jeopardize the ability of Israel’s next generation to succeed in the 21st century.  He and his wife Illeana have been supporters of Siroka Hospital in Beersheva, where they are the primary sponsors for the Oncology unit and the Children's Cancer patient wing. 

He has also focused his attention on higher education, funding graduate fellowships, information technology and computer science at Stanford, Ben Gurion University, and the business school at INSEAD outside Paris, where he also serves as a board member, and, in his spare time, as an adjunct professor.

In the policy arena, Eric serves on the board of the New America Foundation, which relies on a venture capital approach to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to fore of our nation’s public discourse.

Eric has truly made a difference as a civic entrepreneur in many parts of the world, but it is for his work here in Silicon Valley that we honor him today.  As Chair of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley’s Smart Valley, Eric has taken the lead in demonstrating how the technology we make here can transform the way we live.   In the 1990s, he was a leader in networking the Valley’s K-12 schools.  Today he is co-chair of Joint Venture’s Smart Health project, which is using technology to develop new ways of improving health care quality and reducing cost.  Smart Health is currently building an administrative network that will drive down the cost of processing claims. He is a leading force in creating Wireless Silicon Valley, which will soon enable a wireless network that will provide seamless access throughout our region.  Wireless Silicon Valley has been able to bring together all the cities in the Valley to deal with a wireless provider as a single entity.  He also serves on the board of the Center for Excellence in Nonprofits, and supports a number of local schools, the San Jose Rep and museums.

Of course, Eric will be the first to tell you that his family is the source of inspiration and balance.  His wife Illeana supports his civic efforts in local schools and Siroka Hospital in Israel, and his sons Ori and Manny are carving their own way.  Ori is writing his Ph.D. thesis in virology at Penn, working on cures for AIDS and SARS, and Manny is working on his Masters in Political Science and Foreign Service at Georgetown, working on Civil Rights in the Middle East. Throw in an occasional marathon, some downhill, and some finger picking, and you get the picture of a man who lives his life with incredible energy, passion and commitment.

Through it all, Eric has developed a philosophy of civic entrepreneurialism that is characteristically bold yet humble.  He believes that the approaches and lessons learned in high technology are directly applicable to collaborative civic work, but, to be truly effective, civic entrepreneurs must adopt a particularly humble attitude in order to bridge the gap that separates the hard driving high tech environment from the nonprofit world.  “While we have much to contribute,” he says wisely, “we have much to learn too.”

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the 2007 David Packard Civic Entrepreneur Award winner, Eric Benhamou.