San Jose Chamber of Commerce honors its history, aims toward the future

When you’re a 140-year-old organization like the San Jose Chamber of Commerce, it can be a challenge to strike the right balance between honoring the group’s history and staying relevant for the 21st century.

The chamber pulled that off pretty well Thursday night at its Leaders and Legacy dinner, attended by nearly 500 people at the Signia by Hilton hotel in downtown San Jose.

The history part was easy: The chamber honored the Normandin family, which has been selling transportation of one kind or another to the Santa Clara Valley since 1875. Amable Normandin buggy-manufacturing shop opened 150 years ago and then did a very Silicon Valley thing and pivoted when cars came along a few decades later. Now, the multi-generation business occupies a landmark spot on San Jose’s auto row on Capitol Expressway. There’s even an original Normandin buggy from 1882 on the roof — a subtle reminder that the Normandin in the name is older than Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram or Fiat.

The presentation of the Legacy Leader Award also gave the chamber and audience an opportunity to remember Lon Normandin, who died at age 91 in December 2025. Chamber CEO Leah Toeniskoetter noted that in addition to running the family business, he deepened the family’s civic engagement — helping found Heritage Bank of Commerce and supporting Catholic education causes as well as social service organizations like Martha’s Kitchen, where he remained a regular volunteer into his later years.

“The Normandin name has come to represent not only entrepreneurial success but generosity in community leadership,” Toeniskoetter said. “In a region often defined by what is new and next, the Normandins remind us that endurance, integrity and long-term commitment matter just as much as innovation.”

Staying with the historic theme, immediate past board chair Rob Lindo and current chair Ed Davis invited several of their predecessors to the stage to help raise $100,000 for the Bob Kieve Chamber Building Preservation Foundation. It seemed like a tall order, but they managed it in a matter of minutes, helped by a $35,000 anonymous matching gift, $10,000 contributions from Davis and developer David Neale, $5,000 from the Swenson Foundation and $25,000 from the Toeniskoetter Family Foundation.

“If you were at the Chamber of Commerce dinner 140 years ago, everyone would be talking about prunes. How are your prunes doing?” joked KCBS traffic reporter Kim Vestal, who served as emcee.

Artificial intelligence seems to be the 2026 equivalent of the prune in today’s valley, so that was the topic of discussion onstage between Cisco Executive Vice President Francine Katsoudas and Casey Newton, the founder and editor of Platformer and host of the New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast. Their talk centered around what Newton called the big question — “What’s AI and what is it going to do to me and my family? — and explored how artificial intelligence tools are already changing the way we live.

Who knows? Maybe in a century, future San Joseans will be talking about AI the way we talk about prunes. Chances are a Normandin will be part of that conversation, too.

SILICON VALLEY’S TOWN HALL: A lot of the charts and graphs in this year’s Silicon Valley Index indicate we’re bouncing back from the COVID-19 pandemic in lots of ways. That’s also true of the annual State of the Valley conference, held Friday morning at San Jose State, which is back to being one of the top networking events on the calendar. How can you tell? While Joint Venture Silicon Valley CEO Russ Hancock ran a tight schedule, it took more effort than usual to get the crowd to their seats and quiet.

This year marks the 32nd annual release of the Silicon Valley Index, a data-driven measure of how the valley stacks up in terms of job growth, demographics, housing prices and the like. While inflation is on everyone’s minds these days, Joint Venture’s Rachel Massaro noted this year’s index had been downsized from more than 200 pages to less than a hundred.

Even that might have seemed like a lot to Doug Henton of Collaborative Economics, who was the original architect of the index more than three decades ago. He talked about Joint Venture’s creation and the history of the index, which he worked on with John Melville and Kim Walesh. San Jose Jazz Executive Director Brendan Rawson worked on those early indexes as a researcher and cringed at seeing some of his early graphics work from the ’90s shown on the big screen.

Derek Thompson, co-author of the bestseller “Abundance,” delivered the keynote to close the event and noted that San Jose and Silicon Valley may be ground zero for many of the problems outlined in his book — but may also be showing the promise to overcome those problems. “One thing I love about visiting this part of the country is the sense that the people here want to work on work that’s about the future and want to work on projects whose ultimate impact will reverberate beyond this ZIP code, this state,” he said.

CLUBHOUSE LEADERS: Mark Washbush has played a lot of “chief” roles at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley, including chief development officer, chief operating officer, chief strategy officer and chief program officer in his 12 years with the youth-serving nonprofit. Now, he’s going to have to get used to a new title, president, as he takes over for Steve Wymer, who announced Thursday that he was stepping down from the role after five-plus years to create a new foundation for the organization.

During Wymer’s tenure, Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley increased the number of youth it served by nearly 10 times, adding 30 club sites, merging with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Contra Costa and moving its administrative offices to downtown San Jose. Wymer said he decided on the move following the success of its Youth of the Year gala in January.

“I’m thrilled Mark is stepping into this role to help usher BGCSV into the next season of growth and excited to continue serving this important mission leading the creation of the BGCSV Foundation to ensure we have the resources needed to serve generations of kids to come,” Wymer said.

CALENDAR COLLISION: There must be something mystical about the date April 25 that makes it a good time to raise money. No fewer than five big events are scheduled for that Saturday: the San Jose Museum of Art’s Gala and Auction, City Lights Theater Company’s “Beach Ball,” the Computer History Museum’s Fellow Awards celebration, Child Advocates of Silicon Valley’s Black, White and Pink Ball, and the 13th annual Lumentum Heart and Soles Run.