The day began by having our book talks at the Starbucks at the Stanford Mall. It was a rainy and rather gloomy day, so it seems appropriate to take care of several of our reports before we had our first meeting of the day at noon. I read the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell which I found very interesting for many ways, specifically because the book can be utilized by so many different kinds of people throughout any industry. We had a good chat about Twitter while we were at it, including why we didn't have an account before this class and why we find it useful now/if we were going to continue using it. I will because I can use it to find out information that would take a lot longer to filter out otherwise.
Benetech is a non profit organization that aids in social welfare projects across the globe, ranging from literacy, human rights and the environment. I took a particular interest in this firm and the message behind it because I feel that it is important for me to begin narrowing my career interests into fields that are doing some good in the world, which I definitely felt that Benetech was doing. I loved their current 'big' project, which was scanning books so that a tech application could read it to them- useful for the autistic and blind. The man we were talking to was so passionate about his company, it resonated with everything he said about it. I believe I would have had the same opinion if my employer was doing just positive things in the world also. Benetech also let us take a book with us that had been "killed" by cutting the binding and thus releasing all the pages. I pick the Prince by Machiavelli, it's been on my list for a while so why not get it for free?
Our second venture capitalist firm of the trip was Sierra Ventures, where we met with Robert Walker who had a very interesting background before he became an investor (physics background with energy specialties). Brilliant man. I took away some things from this meeting that were very different than our meeting with Ann Winblad. 1. LED lighting is awesome in many ways. 2. Time is more limiting than money for this firm. He spoke much more about the industry that he came from rather than the ways Entrepreneurs can get financed, as Ann did. Both were incredibly useful though, in two entirely different ways.
With the free time we had between our meeting with Robert and our dinner with Craig we ventured off to the Stanford campus and bookshop. I was looking for an Ultimate Frisbee Disc which I failed at acquiring but still enjoyed looking around their gorgeous campus (check out the arches) and browsing their very large bookstore.
Tomorrow is GOOGLE!
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