CS @ HBS

I’m starting to pay my debt to society and write about the things I did over winter break, before coming back to -5 degrees in Boston. So in reverse chronological order, just before returning here I spent a week in the Bay Area, as part of the HBS WesTrek, organized by the HBS TechMedia Club. The trek consisted of company visits to ~50 companies, including technology, CPG (consumer packaged goods), consulting and finance. About 70 HBS students participated, each deciding which meetings to attend, where to sleep and which car to rent. Unlike other treks, this one is very “free form” and each participant kind of does her own thing.
I naturally focused on technology companies. It was really fun to see in real life the companies I only read about, or use their products. It was also interesting to see the differences between large companies like Yahoo! (a multi-building campus with nice printed guest tags), the smaller ones like LinkedIn (free drinks in branded refrigerators) and the tiny crazy ones like Slide (dogs barking at the entrance to the office).

Here are a few funny anecdotes and photos from the meetings:

• We met 3 CEOs: Dianne Greene of VMWare, Dan Nye of LinkedIn and Meg Whitman of eBay. The last two (as well as many others we met on the trek) are HBS alumni. Meeting Meg Whitman was extremely impressive – she was with us 30 minutes and had an interesting Q&A session with us.
• “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” — Wayne Gretzky. Quoted at our presentation at Apple while referring to Apple’s strategy.
• Harvard University has been offering a course in Second Life for the last year and a half. IBM held employee meetings “In World”.
• “Every value proposition of an internet startup is based on one of the 7 deadly sins” – at a meeting at Slide with Keith Rabois, VP Strategy & Business Development.
• 1 million people join LinkedIn every month. Every January, there’s a surge in the number of users joining (probably as a result of a “new year resolution” of keeping in touch).
• Second Life (or rather Linden Lab, the company who made Second Life) has a company “Love Machine”, a simple intranet website where employees can compliment each other on good little things they did for each other. Some of these compliments are factored into employees’ bonuses.
• IBM Research Center in the valley is surrounded with mountains, fields and cows. And nothing else.
• Dan Nye, LinkedIn CEO, in career advice to HBS students: “in your first job out of school, focus on great people, skill development and doing what you love. Don’t chase the buck! Be patient and eventually your opportunity will come, stay the course”.
• Dan Nye’s mom in career advice to him after he graduated from HBS: “in your first job out of school, forget that you went to Harvard”.
• “Summit” is a sales training program at IBM for MBA graduates. It lasts 5 months and aftewards the graduate assumes sales responsibility for a region.
• The CEO of Salesforce.com is a buddhist who lives in Hawaii. All the conference rooms in their offices are named after Hawaiian places / terms.
• Part of the strategy of salesforce.com is philanthropy: they give 1% of their equity, time and products to society (in charity, employee volunteering activities and free subscriptions to organizations like the red cross).
• PlugandPlayTechCenter is a cool place in Sunnyvale that hosts dozens of very-early-stage startup companies. For a relatively low rent these companies get their own cubicle (or a combination of cubicles and closed office space), network infrastructure, office services, networking events, access to VC’s, interaction with other companies like them… the entire place simply buzzes with activity of hundreds of people creating new things, and frankly it’s quite exciting.
• 8 Plug and Play companies presented to us. The founder of one of them was Israeli who worked with one of my best friends from Israel.
• 3 things Google needs in order to operate in a developing country: online access, remote payment system, package delivery system.
• “Del Dotto” (Italian for “The Cave”) is a winery in Napa Valley that does its wine tastings straight out of the barrels.
• IBM does some of the coolest, most innovative research in its 8 global research centers (including one in Haifa, Israel) – their neural research tries to mimic the brain’s neural activity and is currently only 1 order of magnitude far from mimicking a mouse’s brain. Another cool project is Mastor, for immediate speech and language translation.
• LinkedIn is about to launch a new homepage and open up the site to external applications.
• IBM is almost 100 years old.
• For the last 10 years IBM has been filing 30,000 patent requests every year.
• “Statistics is the sexy profession of 2010″ — Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google
• The Silicon Valley is an awesome place. After one week there I ended up with two start up ideas (well, excluding the start up idea I get every time I fly – babyless flights)

Yahoo!

Yahoo!

IBM’s campus.

IBM’s campus.

IBM’s Extreme Blue labs.

IBM’s Extreme Blue labs.

IBM – The world’s first hard drive, 1956, 5MB.

LinkedIn…

LunchedIn @ LinkedIn…

PlugandPlayTechCenter