What A Day!

Had an exceptional day today and a busy one at that. We started off  on a tour of Apple. Enough said? not even close! Unfortunately, I had to keep my photographic trigger finger at bay. We weren't allowed to take many pictures inside of Apple, but it was still one of the best tours we've had so far.
Apple was extremely accommodating and Dominic Rapini, the national accounts manager of Apple, did us a great service by putting together an amazing tour. We were able to speak with many of Apples employees and got to tour the Apple Headquarters here in Palo Alto.

The people we spoke with at Apple where primarily in sales, but their job descriptions and backgrounds varied tremendously. Jim, who headed a team at Apple, was primarily tasked to help businesses come up with solutions to problems that might be preventing them from adapting certain technologies, such as using iPads or iPhones for Inventory systems. The problems he and his team would be solving could be something like network or integration issues. His background included everything from Elementary school band teacher to systems analysis for the Norwood education system. Jim explained that he has always been lucky with getting to do the things that he enjoyed. Thomas, one of Jims' team members, was a software engineer who had a similar job as Jim surprisingly. Thomas was originally born in Venezuela, but lived the first part of his life in France.

The last customer he helped, witch I find interesting, was non other than Disney. Thomas, like Jim, has a specialty and his specialty is writing or adapting software to help his customers.  Every member of Jims' team had a very different background which could aid a customer in a unique way.

Another person we spoke with was Anne, whom was a marketing specialist with Apple. Her job was to make sure that which ever product she was assigned was being marketed to it's customer base properly. She had a very interesting background, having worked with the first women to become secretary of state, madeleine Albright. Anne gave us a unique perspective of how Apple works cross departmentally. She described a very collaborative relationship when she of her job.

We also spoke with many more people at lunch who were sales and operations representatives and were very open with their own personal stories, and by the way Apple has the absolute best lattes. 

Our second stop was Facebook. It was the most dynamic and energetic campus we had been to. The pictures below may help give a better feeling for our experience. Our tour guide was Vicki whom had been at Facebook for about two and a half years. The one thing that really struck me about their campus was the amount of art all around the campus. There where posters and painting and installations everywhere. Honestly, there's not much I can say about the campus that the pictures don't show. It's a very hip and lively place, in my opinion.

The last experience we had this day was a casual meeting with Priyanka Sharma. She is the co-founder of Wakatime. Wakatime is an automated analytics solution for developers, and what this basically means is that it is a service that provides analytical feed back for programmers via a text editor plug in. A text editor is simply a piece of software that programmers use to write their code, much in the way an Author may use Microsoft word to write their stories. Priyankas' start-up is very new on the scene, so we were able to hear how she very recently received funding. She is entering the seed stage with her company, were she will be looking for investors, but she has also raised some funds already through a family-and-friends round of funding.