CEOs Open Up At 3 Days In The Valley

At this year's 3 Days In The Valley, Fox Business Anchor Liz Claman explained the difference between their annual conference and other business events. “[We] give you an opportunity to really tell your business story -- not hammer you for two and a half minutes with people yelling at you and asking about your stock price,” she said. “That's not what we do.” In an interview with Benzinga, Claman said that they came up with the idea to have a conference in Silicon Valley because it is the most creative job engine in the nation. “So we started our own conference -- we called it 3 Days in the Valley after the movie 2 Days in the Valley, and see who will show up and how we can do it,” said Claman, adding that they decided to host it at a different location each day. Twitter and LinkedIn were among the early attendees. “We took a chance on them and they took a chance on us, along with the big names like Adobe ADBE and Symantec SYMC and Yahoo! YHOO and all the big chip equipment makers,” said Claman. eBay's EBAY John Donahoe, PayPal's Scott Thompson and Symantec's SYMC Enrique Salem were among the attendees. Claman said that she really pushed Salem hard on the Facebook privacy issue. “He flat-out said that once you lose that personal information it's gone forever,” said Claman. “You could argue that that was translation for, ‘Facebook blew it.'" One of the most powerful discussions came from venture capitalist Tim Draper. Claman said that once she got through the whole what-are-you-putting-money-into-now, “we got off on a tangent about the movie Waiting for Superman, about the school system. It turns out that Tim had worked very hard to get the voucher situation put on the California ballet, it was shot down, and he cried over that when he saw the movie.”