Obama, Pichai & Zuckerburg preach entrepreneurship at GES

STANFORD, Calif. (Diya TV) — President Barack Obama, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai took centerstage Friday to deliver a singular message: Entrepreneurship is hard, but essential in an increasingly globalized world.

“The world has shrunk. It is interconnected. It promises to bring extraordinary benefit, but it has challenges and can sometimes evoke fears,” Obama said at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University. “Entrepreneurship remains the engine of growth.”

The occasion marked Obama’s second visit to the university this year — he was in attendance for last year’s cybersecurity conference — and his first comments in the aftermath of voters elected to remove the United Kingdom from the European Union. Speaking on the subject, Obama said he was “confident” the U.K. was in a orderly transition from its 43-year membership in the union.

Obama said he’d already had the chance to speak with Prime Minister David Cameron, who Friday announced his plans to resign after the vote. Though the U.K.’s relationship with the union is set to change, Obama said, “our relationship with the U.K. will endure.”

His comments were a rare venture off the set path of the agenda, Obama touched briefly on the importance of diversity, and the continued importance for tech companies to provide annual progress reports on their employees.

During their roundtable discussion, Zuckerberg said his single-largest obstacle has been connecting the world to the internet. Feeding entrepreneurship is heavily continent on making the internet readily available to the 4 billion people on earth without access.

“Personally, the biggest thing I’m concentrating on is connectivity,” Zuckerberg said. “For most folks, this is a blocking factor. Without access to Internet, it is hard to imagine what you are missing out on.”

Technology consistently proves to be a mitigating factor in the U.S. economy, and with its continued growth, greater attention is being paid by government regulators and policymakers. “The Internet is arguably the greatest economic engine of all time,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

AOL co-founder Steve Case evolved the analogy further, saying, “Silicon Valley rose from orchards more than 40 years ago to the epicenter of innovation today.”

Obama’s trip ironically coincided with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s war of words with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. The progressive tech leaders have distanced themselves from the candidate because of Trump’s publicly voiced stances against immigration and his comments about minority groups.