The $2 Billion Dollar Dinner
About two years ago, four friends and their three lovely spouses met for dinner at a local favorite restaurant - Randy Paragary's Sammy Chu's. Much to our disappointment, Sammy Chu's is no longer in business. Icon's is making a go of it there now. We loved Sammy Chu's and miss it. That night we dined in one of the private rooms fit for eight to ten people. We had a lot of fun eating, drinking, and talking about Sacramento things.
I remember one of the conversational threads. It went something like this.
"The Bay area venture capital firms are really missing out on deals in Sacramento", said one of the friends.
Another friend replied, "I frequently hear that they don't believe Sacramento has enough quality senior level managers."
I looked at the dinner party assembled that night and remarked, "If the VC's could see us, they would change their tune. The four friends here tonight represent a very powerful group of leaders with a combined P & L responsibility of roughly $2 billion - a recent Senior Vice President and General Manager of IBM's Storage Group, a current Senior Vice President of Hewlett-Packard, the former Group President of one of the ten largest software companies in the world, and the Director of the Sacramento Public Library."
That was some group that was assembled at Sammy Chu's. And they all lived in the Sacramento area. They still do. I think the VC's don't give Sacramento the proper respect. We have a lot of talent in the area.
Oh, by the way, the group of friends who assembled that evening for dinner - they were four of Sacramento's finest women. Barbara Grant, Marilyn Edling, Gillian Parrillo and Anne Marie Gold - All Sacramento gurus!
Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive
