Marin Tech Firm’s ‘Serendipity’ Series Draws 49ers Exec Yu Thursday

As a former senior exec at Facebook and Yahoo who helped broker YouTube's $1.65 billion sale to Google and is now the president of the San Francisco 49ers, there aren’t likely too many occasions where Gideon Yu has had a tough act to follow.

But when he appears at the ever-growing Marin tech company Message Bus’ Seredipity speaker series Thursday, Yu will do so knowing that the last Serendipity guest brought throngs of attendees out to the company’s parking lot in Corte Madera to show off the latest model of his unmanned aerial vehicles – better known as drones.

Last month’s appearance by Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine and founder and CEO of 3D Robotics, was the 16th installment of the Serendipity series, the theme of which is that “lots of tiny little interactions often contribute to extraordinary moments,” according to Message Bus co-founder and Mill Valley resident Narendra Rocherolle.

For the execs behind three-year-old Message Bus, which creates cloud-based infrastructure for email, mobile and social messaging, the series is about drawing out the entrepreneurs, technophiles and the simply intellectually curious who live and/or work in Marin to get together more frequently. Rocherolle says the series has proven their steadfast hunch that a critical mass of those people were in Marin despite the dearth of major tech companies like San Rafael's Autodesk.

“The community in Marin has always existed, we’re just doing what we can to stitch it together,” Rocherolle says, noting that many of Message Bus’ 35 employees have worked in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where that sense of community exists merely because of the mass of both major and startup tech companies in both.

To date, the Serendipity series, which resemble the famous TED Talks in many ways, has hosted a slew of big names across a broad spectrum of fields, from Fried Green Tomatoes director Jon Avnet and philanthropist Deborah Santana to WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg and Twitter co-founder/CEO Evan Williams.

Anderson’s appearance came at a moment when drones – or at least the discussion of them – seemed to be ubiquitous, from Capitol Hill confirmation hearings to a cover story in Time magazine. Anderson described his 3D Robotics as an “open source hardware and software company.”

He described commercial drone applications like aerial video for farmers looking for fungal blight in their crops, as well as personal ones like having a drone equipped with a video camera follow you while you windsurf on the bay.

“These are the droids you’re looking for,” Anderson quipped, drawing laughs from the crowd for the Star Wars reference. “You can have a personal camera droid just following you while you are doing your coolest stuff.”

Anderson acknowledged the current stigma of drones as weaponry but said computers and the Internet once had a similar militarized association.

“Our job is to flood the market with civilian uses,” he said. “Some day these things will be super cheap and the sky will be dark with them.”

The 411: Gideon Yu appears at the Seredipity series on Thursday, March 28. Request an invite here.