Day Three

Our day started off with a little rain. The above picture is of the court yard in front of our hotel room. I still can't get over how nice our accommodations are.

Our first tour of the day was meant to be Google, but sadly the tour we had planed fell threw last minute. We did however get to view some of the campus. The Google campus is a highly secure area. I haven't seen this level of security at any of our other destinations minus Stanford.  There were security guards everywhere and every door was either locked or guarded. The campus still had a very mellow feel regardless of the security.

 

 



 

 

 

After Google we headed over to a startup called Boxfish, where we met with co-founders Eyon and Kevin. Boxfish is doing something pretty amazing. The company specializes in a practice known as advertising re-targeting. What the company basically does is figure out what kind of media ads, such as television programs, are relative to individual users on social media sites such as twitter. This is a pretty big deal for a couple reasons. For one thing, the amount of data they are collecting and processing is tremendous. Boxfish not only has to collect and decipher everyone's tweets on twitter, but they also have to collect and interpret a ton of data being broadcast by television and online sources in order to figure out what the content actually is. They then essentially cross-reference these two sources of data, in order to determine what ads they should present to you while your on your social media site. This same principle could eventually be used to even make more actuate media recommendations for you while your searching the web or watching television. Our conversations with Eyon and Keven were very informative.

 

The founders of Boxfish also irritated the process they went through when founding their company. It was very interesting to listen to. It seems that Silicon valley really has the template down for the legal and funding process of creating a start up. Eyon explained that lawyers who work with startups in Silicon Valley often work on the basses of only getting paid when the startup receives funding. Lawyers and banks alike, also have many of the processes simplified and streamlined because they deal with these kinds of propositions so frequently.

 



 

 

After our visit to Boxfish, I split of from the group and headed downtown where I found this peculiar object pictured below. From a it merely appeared like some kind of metal egg.

 

 

But as I approached, I realized what it was made of and more importantly what it was titled. It was called "Digital DNA" by Adriana Varella and Nilton Maltz. Silicon Valley is starting to make a little more sense lately. You really do have to consider it an organism, and like this egg it is more than the sum of it's parts. 

The last stop of our day was an informational session at Cretio, where we met a Curry Alum Amber Rice. Amber Graduated from Curry College in 2003 and has been living in the area for about eight years. She is now the Executive assistant of Cretio, and has worked at companies such as Yahoo and Ebay. Having a conversation with someone who is actually familiar with where your coming from offered a nice change of pace. I immediately felt more comfortable speaking with her than I had with anyone thus far. Her demeanor was very welcoming. Amber reminisced with us about her college experiences, and noted how much positive change she's seen happening on our campus since she graduated. She also gave us plenty of useful advice in regards of how to approach this kind of an industry and she described what her personal experience was like when she decided to move to California.

At Cretio we also met with Denise Domingo, the Director of technical solutions, and Dmitry Pavlov, the Vise President of Research and Development. Denise elaborated on what Amber had told us about how Cretios' software works. What Cretio does is similar but also very different from what Boxfish does. Cretio is in the business of advertising re-targating. One thing that works very differently, is that Cretio is targeting mobile devices for their ad re-targeting and they are using the banner ads you often see on websites. They are also using a past browsing histories in order to target their ads to users. As Denise explained to us, the problem with mobile devices is in how they work differently from desktop type devices. In a normal browser session on your desktop, a cookie is placed in a cache on your devices by the website you visit This cookie can contain information such as past product searches or a history that tracks where you went on a given website. With mobile devices this does not occur, and Cretio specializes in dealing with this problem along with re-targeting ads on desktops.
Dmitry gave us advise about finding a company we fit with. He also explained what some of the qualities are that he looks for in an employee and coworkers. During this part of the conversation, he stressed the importance of being able to work with others even over individual skill. He gave a great example of someone working on a project and being able to get results faster with a team of less experienced individuals, than someone working on the same project by themselves.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second Day

Our second day was a pretty big day. It was a day full of surprises. We started off on a tour of Stanford University.

Stanford gives free hour long tours regularly throughout the day. We were part of a very large group, which was divided in to three smaller groups that were divvied up between the three tour guides. The tour guides were all current Stanford students, Our guides' name was Collin. He was a sophomore at Stanford, whom hadn't yet declared a major. He was very knowledgeable about the campus and spoke of it's history, culture and campus life. Collin imparted a real sense of enthusiasm, humility and pride for his campus when he spoke.

His best story by far came from when he explained the application process, and what got him excepted to Stanford University. Unlike most peoples expectations of what a Stanford students application may look like, Collin explained that he hadn't done anything particularly impressive. he never won any prizes of particular note. He wasn't exceptionally talented in any singular regard. What his application did describe, was a high school student who was motivated to go the extra mile with extra curricula activities and one who would always try to do something original.

 

The second place we went was the Computer History Museum. Below are some of my favorite exhibits in the Museum. The chess set is an example of a more artistic approach to using electronic parts, and below that is the PDP-1. The PDP-1 was an 18 bit system developed by the Digital Equipment Corporation. It was also the hardware used to play one of the worlds first video games, "Space Wars".

The last two places we visited were the Hackers Dojo and Concastic.

The Hackers Dojo was, what is referred to as, an incubator. An incubator is basically and inexpensive place for developers to meet up and work on their start-up ideas. There is a membership fee for people who use the space, but it is a much cheaper option than renting an office or building.

Contastic is a startup company which developed a Customer Relations Management (CRM) system. The CRM generates emails with personalized content in order to increase customer relations and raise sales. The Co-founder of Contastic, Cy Khormaee, spoke very openly with us about his life story and how he became a founder. I didn't take any pictures, but this was my favorite part of today. We got a ton of great information on how the process of creating a start up works in Silicon Valley, and how they actually receive funding. We were able to gain a lot of insight from speaking with Cy. He explained just about every aspect of his career with us, and we were all quite surprised by his admissions of failures.  He explained that part of being an entrepreneur is that not every idea is going to work out, especially in the beginning. I guess I never really realized how much of a career entrepreneurship is. It really is a job that people have to learn how to do, just like every other job out there.

First Exposures

Today we toured the VMware and NetApp campuses. Jeff Goodall, our guide at VMware, explained that companies in Silicon Valley like VMware prefer using the term campus to describe their properties. I have to say, after seeing some of these campuses for myself, calling them a campus is a very suiting descriptor. I don't think there's any other term that could describe these properties better.

The VMware campus (seen above) is sprawled out over 125 acres of land. The land itself is actually owned by Stanford University, which VMware in turn leases to build on. This peace of information has a greater effect on the culture of the campus, since the land is protected and carries a sense of being somewhat removed from the rest of Palo Alto. VMware had a very resort like feel to its layout and design. It reminded me somewhat of a larger version of Curry's campus, with its integration of natural and structural elements and that feeling of being somewhat isolated, without actually being in the middle of nowhere. NetApp on the other hand would be more akin to UMass Boston's campus, with its taller buildings and a more city like vibe. NetApp felt very much "right in the middle of things", much in the same way some Boston schools do. In either case, we were clearly dealing with massive companies with a lot of buildings, land and employees.

There honestly was so much to take in today, that I couldn't possibly fit it all in one blog entry. This was only an attempt at expressing what left the biggest and most general impression on me today.