Santa Clara University

Past Celebrations of the Leader's Legacy

November 2007 : Saluting the "Building for the Future" Donors

In November 2007, the Leader's Legacy Celebration honored all donors to the Business School building campaign, most particularly Donald L. Lucas, venture capitalist, the leading contributor to the facility, and great friend of the University.

Donald L. Lucas
Don Lucas believes in the power of business to change the world.  Early in his career, he provided key financial support for leading Silicon Valley companies like Cadence Design Systems, Macromedia, National Semiconductor, and Oracle. Many other companies have benefited from his involvement. Along the way, he has made a number of meaningful charitable gifts in Silicon Valley, culminating in the $15 million gift that led the fundraising for Donald L. Lucas Hall.  Two of his three children attended Santa Clara University and he believes the school not only benefits business locally, but also globally.

Lucas started his career as an associate with Smith Barney in New York in 1955.  In 1960, he went to work as an associate at Draper, Gaither & Anderson (DG&A), the first organized venture capital firm on the West Coast.  He later became a general and limited partner of the firm.  After DG&A distributed its profits in 1967, Lucas began a long career as a private venture capitalist. After 50 years in Silicon Valley, it would easy for Lucas to say he's seen it all, but, instead, he sees many exciting new changes coming down the pike.  "Opportunity hasn't slowed down," he says.  "It's just broadened."

November 2008 : Five Who Practice Leadership

In November 2008, the Leader's Legacy Celebration saluted five friends of the Leavey School of Business : 

Cheryl Breetwor-Evans MBA '78
Over the past eight years, more than 30 Leavey School faculty have been named Breetwor fellows, receiving two-year grants to support faculty research and scholarly development. The fellowship program, a project of the Breetwor Family Foundation, is just one of the ways Cheryl Breetwor-Evans has demonstrated her commitment to enabling others to act not only through her involvement with the business school, but her support of various health and education causes.

Cheryl grew up in Southern California, earning a degree in English and a teaching credential from UC Santa Barbara. She taught in Seattle before returning to the Bay Area and enrolling at Santa Clara. Her first post-MBA job came via a campus recruiter for ROLM Corporation. In 1983, she cofounded ShareData, a software company that helped companies manage stock options on the then-new personal computer.

She became a single mother while at ShareData. One reason the company was sold to e*Trade in 1998 was so she could be a full-time mom to Alyssa and Aaron, now teenagers. She devoted the next few years to volunteering at her children's schools, as well as pursuing artistic and cultural interests. She and her husband, developer Eric Evans, married in 2006. More recently, Cheryl has been a generous donor to building Lucas Hall.

Damodar "Dan" Reddy MBA '75
Even as a graduate student, Dan Reddy liked to challenge the process. Asked to write a business plan for an entrepreneurship class, he developed a paper that turned the prevailing vertical way of doing business on its head by introducing a horizontal model that relied on specialty manufacturers. The paper also became the plan for Dan's first start-up.

He later founded Alliance Semiconductor, for which he was selected "Entrepreneur of the Year" in Northern California in 1995, an award sponsored by Inc., magazine, Ernst & Young and Merrill Lynch. During his 20 years at Alliance, he served as chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer.

Dan earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Osmania University in his native India, and his master's in electrical engineering from North Dakota State University. He retired from Alliance in 2005, got bored after three months and decided to learn about software, starting Sutisoft Inc. The company is located in Reddy's incubator office in Los Altos, which also houses four other Reddy-associated start-ups. He and wife Prameela have four adult children (including a 1998 MBA grad) and three grandchildren. In addition to their generous support of the Leavey School, they are engaged in philanthropies in the U.S. and India.

George Sollman
A quick review of George Sollman's roles over the last 20 years or so demonstrates his ability to lead in challenging environments, including involvement in early stage startups, taking companies public, and negotiating mergers and acquisitions. As chairman and founder of Arabesque Investments LLC, in Atherton, George now focuses on investments in early stage high tech startups.

However, it is his commitment to the Leavey School of Business, its Advisory Board, and its contribution to Silicon Valley that has encouraged Business School faculty and students to achieve more. His passionate support resulted in the growth of such initiatives as the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Venture Capital Summit, and the Advisory Board itself, where he was chair from 2001 to 2004. He received his BSEE from Northwestern University (1964) and an MSEE from Northeastern University (1967). Subsequently, he received five patents in disk storage technology.

William Terry BSEE '55
Bill Terry was executive vice president of Hewlett-Packard during the Golden Age of HP computers. He championed printers when the prevailing wisdom was that the "paperless" office wouldn't need them. He also was instrumental in HP's mini-computer and handheld devices business.

Born in San Jose, Bill graduated from Santa Clara in 1955 with a degree in electrical engineering. He served two years in the U.S. Army before joining HP in 1957 as a sales engineer. He became vice president and general manager of HP's instrument groups in 1974, was promoted to executive vice president in 1980 and four years later was responsible for HP's instrument and design systems groups. He became executive vice president of the Measure Systems Sector in 1986, retiring in 1993.

He is married to Jan Terry, (SCU MBA 1979). Bill has served on the advisory committees for the Engineering School and the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. In 1983, he was elected to Santa Clara's Board of Regents and in 1997 to the Board of Trustees.

Janice Arnold Terry MBA '79
Jan Terry helped inspire a vision of a business world where men and women could be valued for their individual gifts rather than be pigeon-holed by gender.

In 1971, when she got her bachelor's degree in journalism at the University of New Mexico, newsroom roles for women were limited. Instead, she went to work for a company selling instruments to the military and technical industry. The company was Hewlett-Packard, where she eventually held a number of sales and marketing positions.

In 1979, when she got her MBA at Santa Clara, women probably made up about 10 percent of her class and were just starting to be taken seriously in the business world. By the time she left HP in 1986, women had come to be prominent in the sales force. She was the team leader responsible for the company's largest reseller, managing technical, administrative and sales resources for a $100 million account.

She also had married Bill Terry, another Santa Clara graduate. They have four adult children and two grandchildren. Over the years, they've endowed both the William and Janice Terry chairs in engineering and business. They also sponsored the campus statue of St. Ignatius in memory of Bill's mother and have been generous donors to the scholarship fund and Lucas Hall.