Annual Allies in Innovation 2021

Celebrating your support of the Alliance and the SoCal Innovation Ecosystem

Agenda

5:00p – Cocktails

6:20p – Welcome

Opening remarks from Andy Wilson

6:25p – Getting to Know You

Table members introduce themselves

6:40p – Panel Discussion + Q&A

What’s Ahead for SoCal?

7:35p – Dinner

Event Summary

The evening was well captured in Andy’s blog post but here are a few excerpts to give a sense for the evening:

The community of diverse stakeholder leaders who joined us for this celebration was truly amazing! We had strong representation from academia, corporates, VC’s, and community leaders – each bringing important perspectives and expertise to the table. As an aligned community, we can indeed make the SoCal region even more compelling as a center of innovation, technology and entrepreneurship.

With such great leaders in the same room, of course there was great conversation amongst the guests but we also had a terrific panel conversation moderated by our board chair, Gene Sykes, who ran a lively discussion about how Covid has transformed the SoCal innovation ecosystem and what challenges and opportunities are now before us. A big thank you to Gene and our amazing panelists:

• Ryan Kuder runs Techstars Anywhere based in San Diego and is Board Chair of Startup San Diego
• Maria Anguiano, Executive Vice President Learning Enterprise at Arizona State University and UC Regent as well as an Alliance board of directors member (who lives in San Diego)
• Andrea White-Kjoss is Managing Director of the Long Beach Accelerator
• Tad Funahashi, Chief Innovation & Transformation Officer at Kaiser Permanente, and a practicing Orthopedic Surgeon lives in Orange County where Kaiser has its innovation lab
• Rosibel Ochoa, Associate Vice Chancellor Technology Partnerships at UC Riverside and member of the Alliance’s Board of Directors

Thank you to our sponsors

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Supporting Underwriters