//bradfordbytes

An unlikely seatmate in UA First…

Yea, so perhaps I picked the wrong fight to have… Turns out I was just sitting next to Silicon Valley veteran Bill Coleman, in the industry the last 3 decades. When he’s not busy building a cloud computing business, he’s supporting startup Boards. Managed satellite operations for US air force, helped develop the first spreadsheet, spent 9 years at Sun Microsystems building Solaris, founded a software company called BEA systems, which by the way he flipped to Oracle for a cool $8.5 billion. Anyone heard of Salesforce? Well they’re one of the leading software-as-a-service providers and their platform, Force.com, has enabled thousands of developers to take advantage of cloud computing. The platform idea,… well… He says he suggested it to CEO Mark Benioff and only asked for a drink in return. Unfortunately he turned down their Board position offered. Hindsight is 20/20 now that Salesforce is too a multi-billion dollar business.

His wife serves a leading position on the board of El Camino Hospital, one of the nations most connected hospitals and progressive out of Mountainview CA, in Google territory. Used to work with them through the Advisory Board.

And as for the Palm debate, it was quite amicable, however uneven considering he just left Palm’s Board of Directors. Was the Sprint only decision for launching the Pre a bad idea? I doubt he was too bullish on it.

Needless to say our conversation was fascinating.

Bumming now in Denver at B25. And these new all fruit Jamba Juice concoctions are bad ass. Get me to Washington.