Silicon Valley venture capitalist Heidi Roizen, the subject of a popular case study on networking, will give the final keynote address at the 17th annual Women in Leadership Conference April 6 at the Haas School of Business.
With a focus on pathbending leadership and the four Berkeley-Haas Defining Principles, this year’s conference will explore the type of leaders that help drive business towards a more sustainable, healthy, and just future.
In addition to Roizen, the event will feature a keynote with Haas alumna Joy Chen (pictured left), BS 87, CEO of Yes To, a global natural skin care company. Earlier this year, Chen was among the 15 winners of the San Francisco Business Times 2012 Most-admired CEOs Award. A third keynote will feature a conversation between Sue Gardner, executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, and Haas Professor Jenny Chatman.
Roizen, a venture partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, will participate in a conversation with Haas Adjust Assistant Professor Kellie McElhaney, faculty director of the Center for Responsible Business. Roizen has spent her career immersed in the Silicon Valley ecosystem—as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, educator, and board member of private and public companies and nonprofits. She founded an early personal computer software company in 1983, which she led as CEO until its acquisition in 1994. In 1996, she joined Apple as vice president of worldwide developer relations. She left Apple three years later to become a venture capitalist, first at Mobius and then at Draper.
Roizen teaches an entrepreneurship course to engineering students at Stanford and serves on the board of several companies, including TiVo. She is so well connected that she became the subject of a Harvard Business Case study on the role of networking in building a successful career, although she has said she hates the term “networking.”
In addition to Roizen’s keynote, the conference will incorporate a new format in the afternoon, with interactive workshops based around the four Haas principles: Question the Status Quo; Confidence Without Attitude; Students Always; and Beyond Yourself. The Students Always workshop, for example, will feature an interactive, role-playing exercise to teach about the “The 10 People You Need on Your Personal Advisory Board” in order to be a Student Always in your career and life.
Similar to previous years, the conference will feature three keynotes (two to be announced) industry panels in the morning on everything from financial services to retail to technology.
The event, the longest-running student-organized conference at Haas, is expected to attract 500 attendees.
Early-bird tickets are available until March 6. For more information, visit http://wilconference.org. To register, visit wilconference2013.eventbrite.com.