I went to a talk by Dan Gelbart, CTO and co-founder of Creo yesterday. I'll admit I was initially drawn by the free pizza, but the presentation was even better. Mr. Gelbart spoke casually about starting Creo and gave some advice about starting a technology business. He's an excellent speaker - very much at ease in front of a crowd, well-spoken, and quite funny.

I asked him if he ever looks back on his education and wishes he'd paid more attention in any particular classes. He enthusiastically answered that yes, he wished he'd paid more attention to most classes in university. For example, Lempel and Ziv of LZW fame taught him at one point, but he skipped so many classes that he didn't take advantage of their genius. He went so far as to calculate the minmum number of hours he needed to study in order to renew his scholarship each year. But he said that what he didn't realize at the time was that one doesn't often get a chance to listen to so many people who really know what they're talking about and that we should enjoy university while we can.

He also suggested that we pay attention to any good professors and try in particular to understand math and physics because everything else follows from there. In a room dominated by physics and engineering physics students, I think that message was pretty well received. "When you open a new book and it starts with 'this triple integral obviously shows [...]' and you don't see it, you'll just close the book and go on to other things." Words to live by.

He also mentioned that his passion is electro-mechanical systems and he has a pretty fancy lab at home, so now he's mostly a gentleman of leisure.