A Letter from Jim Alves
When Mark Franich and I sat down with Fr. Paul Sheridan, S.J. several years ago and created the Dads of Grads, one of our goals was to give fathers of young men who attended Bellarmine a chance to stay involved with the Bellarmine community after their son’s graduations by providing interesting and informative social events.
I am amazed at the caliber of events we have offered the community with interesting and informative speakers. Most recently, California Supreme Court Justice Ming Chin offered a compelling story of a Chinese immigrant family coming to America during a time of severe discrimination toward the Chinese. He spoke of his families’ hard work and determination, his Bellarmine experiences and his eventual rise to Supreme Court Justice. His story could be included In California history lessons.
Our evening with Twitter and Square’s founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, began a series of interesting technology speakers. While Dorsey’s evolution is relatively recent and progressive, we countered that with an evening with Adobe Systems founder, Charles Geschke. Charles spoke about how he created the foundation for Adobe Systems with partner John Warnock while at XEROX’s Palo Alto Research Center in the early 70’s, and grew into the $5 billion company it is today.
Perhaps one of the more interesting evenings was when the DOGs hosted Sujay Jaswa of Drop Box and Neil Malhotra, Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, as they spoke on the “Life Cycle of a Start Up.” As childhood friends and Bellarmine grads, they were soon to embark on a joint teaching assignment on “Disruptive Innovation” at Stanford. With their differing approaches to business, they were quite entertaining.
We had a sports evening with San Jose State University’s football coach Ron Caragher addressing the audience. A former Bellarmine player, Ron played and coached at UCLA under Terry Donohue, and shared several meaningful experiences that have helped get him where he is today.
Looking back on the speakers the DOGs have featured at the Sobrato Theatre in the last few years, and our mission to continue to provide great speakers in the future, we hope that others will attend and enjoy future DOG’s events.