I’m currently enjoying a great series of podcasts delivered over the past year at the Stanford University School of Engineering and sponsored by the VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, BASES (a student entrepreneurship group), Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and the Department of Management Science and Engineering.

You can find this series on the iTunes Music Store under the Education category (second screen, 4th row down) or via this direct link.

There are 25 hour-long presentations on file. All available for free download. The presenters and topics they cover offer a fascinating look at the personalities and checkered history that makes up Silicon Valley. The audience of Stanford students hears from and asks questions of executives who have been there and done that in terms of surviving and thriving in the Silicon Valley ecosystem — a place where failure is a badge of success and people talk of ‘dog years’ of experience.

I’ve started by listening to three amazing women CEO’s:

Carol Bartz, Executive Chairman of the Board and CEO of Autodesk for the past 14 years, reflecting on her experience of running one of the largest PC software companies in the world while finding a balance between her career and personal life. She also stresses the importance of continued learning and addresses the challenges of succeeding in a global market.

Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource describing her twenty years of experience in developing software in Silicon Valley including Java development with Sun Microsystems and the open source community.

Janice Fraser, CEO and a founding partner of Adaptive Path, discussing the entrepreneurial leadership qualities that have contributed to the success of her user experience consulting company.

I worked in Carol Bartz’s sales organization at Sun back in the 1990’s and also saw Kim present at Sun when she was the original Java Product Manager before she went off to found Marimba.

All three women executives admit to being ‘girl geeks’ who embraced science and technology in college and often followed a serendipitous career to the top.

All share incredible insights about starting and growing a high-tech company. They speak with clarity, from the heart, about what motivated them and what they’ve observed. Things as simple as asking the customers what they use the product for (which Bartz says precious few of the staff at Autodesk knew before she arrived and started asking). Issues around the ways to partner for success in the world of Web 2.0 and Open Source (which Polese and Fraser are adept at). The importance of networks, intuition, planning, listening, leading, arguing, anticipating.

Rather than try and write a précis of each person’s material I’d just encourage anyone with an interest in executive communications to simply download and listen. Here’s some killer quotes to whet your appetite.

Bartz:

Don’t be afraid of doing a lot of lateral things. A career as a ladder is a very unsteady concept compared to a pyramid — you have no foundation.

Polese:

There’s nothing more fun than being on a mission together with a team of people building something innovative, breaking new ground and really making a difference in the world. What could be more fun? Not many things in life. And that’s one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is such as great place to build a career and just to live and be.

Fraser:

Being an entrepreneur is not a job, it’s a way of life. It’s a mission more than it is a job. I’m not employed by a company I’m employed by an industry. I’m employed by an ecosystem of people who believe in me and who support me and who I support in turn.