Several tech stars (CEOs) gathered at the Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco, which ends today. This year’s theme is to help CEOs steer their companies through the era of changes and trends that are changing the relationships and basic structure of big companies around the world, according to their website.
New Worries
CEOs are one in their worry about the “unicorns,”those so called private start-ups that amass at least a billion dollars in funding. The established companies think these are high-tech disruptors. Another worry for them is that the tech market boom is close to reaching is climax, so the question is what’s to happen next. According to Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, the unicorns are taking their time in going public and they raise so much money. However, Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO had a different take on it. For her, it’s a good sign that these start-ups are flourishing today, unlike in 1999 when many start-ups went belly-up.
Good attendance at the forum
CEOs of many top global companies attended the forum, which opened Monday at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Among the attendees were Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet, Marc Andreessen, well-known venture capitalist and Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.
Former CEO and now Executive Chairman of Cisco Systems, John Chambers, spoke during the forum’s first day. Although he’s an optimist, he predicted that about 40 percent of the companies that attended the forum, both tech and non-tech, would not be existing within 10 years for they would be victims of “digitization.” He added that even Cisco Systems cannot escape this threat.
For the CEO of Flex, Mike McNamara, new technologies like 3-D printing, are changing the medical, automotive and manufacturing industries. Flex is a manufacturing and design company.
Michael Dell and Marc Andreessen, who were in Dublin for the Web Summit, said that they do not believe they are in a bubble but rather in a bust, as technology remains undervalued, adding that the stock market is not very fond of tech industries. Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince, a security company, acknowledged that there will be massive shifts that are going to happen not only in the tech sector, as smartphones are seen to develop a new set of technology giants, just like what Airbnb and Uber did to the hotel and taxi industries.
From what could be gathered, the forum highlighted the volatility of the tech market. The 350 CEOs from 32 Fortune 500 companies who attended this year’s forum were united in saying that they will still take tech and create changes.
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