Obama immediately flew by helicopter to San Francisco for dinner with tech executives, shortly after Air Force One touched down in Silicon Valley at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif.
The summit, expected to feature presentations by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and AOL co-founder Steve Case, begins Friday morning at Stanford, according to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
But Thursday’s dinner guest list included Pichai, LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman, Silicon Valley Bank managing director Claire Lee, and venture capitalists John Doerr and Chamath Palihapitiya, the newspaper said.
“What you and past generations of entrepreneurs have already achieved has brought about a revolution in our world right now,” Secretary of State John Kerry told the Stanford gathering Thursday in pre-conference remarks.
“Economic policy is foreign policy and foreign policy is economic policy, particularly in the globalized world we’re living in today,” he said.
Obama and U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Palo Alto) flew together from Washington and were met at Moffett Field by San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors President Dave Cortese, and local mayors Glenn Hendricks of Sunnyvale and Patricia Showalter of Mountain View.
The summit is the seventh and last global entrepreneurial meeting promoted by Obama, and has attracted 1,200 business leaders from 170 countries, the newspaper said.
The White House said this week that it had pledges from 30 tech companies including Box, Airbnb, Lyft and Pinterest to increase diversity in their workforces.
Obama leaves office in January.
