After quite a ride to get here, StartupCamp7 is finally upon us. Given the weather many in the North East have been experiencing, I’m sure it won’t matter who is presenting where. Just being in Miami, having picked up about 60 degrees along the way, will be more than enough. But we do have a very special show this time around that I find myself counting the hours to.

John Sculley, one of a tiny but very elite group with ‘CEO-Apple’ on their resume, will be with us on Thursday night, imparting his enormous insight on topics of many kinds. He will share the stage with four carefully selected entrepreneurs, each of whom will have five minutes to impress not only the judges but the entire audience. None of these companies are much more than a year-old, most of them less than that in fact. And each targeting very distinct markets, ranging from globalization to video-enabled customer service to personal emergency services. As organizers, we’re introducing some neat format tweaks that we’re confident will make the evening a great time spent by all.

Sculley seems the perfect fit this time around. An innovator since day one, by the age of 10 Sculley was already dismantling radios and converting them into intercoms. By age 30, he was Pepsi’s youngest vice president of marketing. And in 1977, Sculley was named the youngest ever President of Pepsi-Cola, soon to become known as the man behind the original Pepsi Challenge. By the time Sculley left Pepsi in 1983, before moving on to become CEO of Apple, the Pepsi brand had become the largest-selling consumer packaged goods brand in America, surpassing Coca-Cola in market share. His time at Apple, while viewed as controversial by many, surely has some to do with it ultimately becoming the world’s most admired and valuable company.

While we have worked diligently to devise the right set of questions for John to address on stage, we really want to know what the IT Expo crowd wants answered. So we have created a hashtag – #asksculley – to be used this week as we lead up to Thursday night. Feel free to post questions on Twitter using the hashtag. We will pull them all down, categorize them and see which ones we can get answered on stage. And, we’ll even put all ‘Tweeter’s of #asksculley into a drawing for some special prizes to be handed out Thursday night.

See you on site. And don’t forget to #asksculley.

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