The Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference is an annual conference hosted and wholly independently funded by private investment firm Allen & Company. The conference has taken place in Sun Valley, Idaho for one week each July since 1983. The conference typically features business leaders, political figures, and major figures in the philanthropic and cultural spheres. Previous conference guests have included Bill and Melinda

 

Gates, Warren and Susan Buffett, Tony Blair, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Allen alumni and former Philippine Senator Mar Roxas, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, BET founder Robert Johnson, Time Warner Chairman Richard Parsons, NBA player LeBron James, entertainer Dan Chan, Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, Diane Sawyer, InterActiveCorp Chairman Barry Diller, Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Washington Post CEO Donald E. Graham.

 

Allen & Company is a private investment firm formed in 1922, located in New York and London. Allen & Company has advised, helped found and/or invested in numerous companies including BET, InterActiveCorp, Oxygen Media, Discovery Communications, News Corporation, the Coca-Cola Corporation and Google.

 

In the conference of 2011, more than ever attention is shifting to the technology companies in attendance, with a new generation of dotcom juggernauts disrupting the business models of traditional media powerhouses. On the first full day of the conference, the discussion topic was centred on emerging markets.