Silicon Valley history
During our trip in San Francisco, we had the opportunity to visit the technology hub of the United States: The Silicon Valley. It is the home to many of the world’s biggest high-tech corporations, as well as thousands of startups. The questions that you may be wondering are: How does it all started? Why is the Silicon Valley as famous as it is nowadays? Well, we have been told that the birthplace of the Silicon Valley may be the “HP Garage”. Indeed, In 1938 David and Lucile Packard got married and rented the first floor of the house at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. The picture below shows the garage. In 1989, the state of California named the garage “the Birthplace of Silicon Valley” and made it a California Historical Landmark. Furthermore, Dave Packard and Bill decided to pursue their earlier plan of starting their own business. That’s when the name HP (vs. PH) was chosen by a coin toss. The development of Silicon Valley was possible essentially because of the synergy of companies and the so famous Stanford University. Still today companies and students from the university work together on researching new technologies as they do with Silicon (a raw material used for electronic components). When visiting Intel, we learned how they transformed silicon. Intel had several floors to transform this raw materiel and they insured that there was any dust to interfere in the transformation of the product. That high concentration of small flourishing companies was possible because of their need of that component (silicon) to produce computer product – this is the era of informatics. More globally, according to the Computer History museum we have been told that Silicon Valley had 5 major waves of innovation that make them became a rich innovation ecosystem: i) Defense (1950s-1978); ii) Integrated Systems (1979s-1986); iii) Computers (1985s-1995); iv) Internet (1995s-2005); v) Social Media (2005s-2013). Some of the companies of the previous waves still have their headquarter in there, even if some of them, like Hewlett Packard, had to rethink their activities and strategy.
Computer History Museum
In the morning of Presidents’ Day, we made our way to Mountain View, to review four-decade history of computing at the Computer History Museum. The Computer History Museum established in 1996, which is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on society. Everyone received a small blue badge and get ready to start his journey in time. A guide was dedicated to our group. A passionate of informatics and a fan of female computer scientists who had spent his entire career in the famous companies of Silicon Valley and now for his retirement shares his passion with people from all around the world. He had a folder file in his hand, we showed one by one the precious photos at that time. We start our visit with the alphabet of computing: “abacus,” the first calculator of humans and Pantograph Card Punch, a machine made by Heram Hollerith to recording data on punched cards which would be read by a tabulating machine. You can see the evolution of computer gurus in the museum, the “firsts” in history, their origins and the birth and the die of products. The first apple (apple I), the first super computer and the first prototype of the computer mouse. You can have a look at the inside of a Cray supercomputer, the grandfather of all super computers, the beautiful IBM s/360 and an example of the first-generation of Google’s Web servers and much. We even found the story behind the word Spam. The term spam is derived from the 1970 Spamsketch of the BBC television comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The sketch is set in a cafe nearly every item on the menu includes Spam canned luncheon meat. As the waiter recites the Spam-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating, “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… lovely Spam! wonderful Spam!”, hence “Spamming” dialogue. Later on, the word “Spam” turn into undesirable messages. After ascending in the history, we continued our tour in the enormous campus of Google. The colorful free bicycles are provided in the campus. In the evening we took the Cal Train to go back to San Francisco, and I was thinking of the progress of the human being in less than 50 years and the people that made this come true. Now it’s our turn to make an impact and change the future. Akram & Peng
Visit from Craig Newmark
InthisTuesday 17th of February we had the luck to receive Craig Newmark in the Swissnex. He is the founder of Craiglist, the main local classified website in the USA. The website is one of the most seen in the world. It receives more than 50 billion views per month. That’s represent more than 60 million of users and 80 million of classifieds adds each month in the USA and even more around the world. He came to tell us the story of Craigslist and to talk about his current engagement. Craig described himself as a nerd. He worked at IBM for 17 years as a web developer and move to Silicon Valley in 1993. story of Craigslist began in 1995. As a hobby he decided to launch a newsletter to inform people about the different event in the bay area. To collect enough e-mail addresses, he collected the visit card of the everybody he met. At the beginning, Craig was alone to share events, but quickly a lot of people began to use the platform. And the user started to call the newsletter “The Craig’s list”. Craig was surprised to see that the purpose of the list has involve. Companies use it to look for new employees, especially developers. Craig decided to add a rubric for Jobs research. By the time others rubrics has been added. In 1997, Craig realized that the newsletter was not adapted any more. He created the website Craigslist.com. In the beginning of 1998 thelist was still a non-profit hobby for Craig. He hired two people to help him to develop the website. In 1999 the Craigslist become a for-profit company. In 2000 the company had 9 employees working in Craig’s flat in San Francisco. During the same year Craig realize that he was not a good CEO to run a business, so he hired Jim Buckmaster as CEO (still current CEO). Later, Craigslist started to ask money two kind of ads. 25$ to post a jobs, 10$ for apartments. These prices are much lower than in any other way to advertise a job or an apartment. The business model surprised a lot of observatory, especially some Wall Street analysts like UBS. Maximizing the profit is not at all the goal the company. They are just using their revenues to cover the operating costs. They focus almost exclusively on maintaining and improving the website and on helping people to find their car, a flat or even a job. Craigslist is the perfect example of his founder philosophy. Using technology for the public good. Today Craig is no-more involved in Craigslist.com. In 2011 he founded Craigconnects, his personal Web-based initiative to stand up for organizations “getting stuff done” in areas Craig is passionate about. These include veterans and military families, open government, public diplomacy, back-to-basics journalism and fact-checking, consumer protection, and technology for the public good. During this visit of Craig, we met a really interesting person. An innovator in the non-profit sector. He reminds us that making profit should not be the only goal of a company and that having a real impact on people life is as important as making profit. ¨ Bryan Pilet Student in management and business administration HEIG-VD
School close to San Francisco
Two of the most famous schools from United States are located near to San Francisco and we had the opportunity to visit them, the Universities of Stanford and Berkeley. They are places where students combine ideas, technology and innovation to make new prototype on things that we already have and that can be improved. Stanford We have been able to visit the local of the Design School as well as the Engineering School. One of the most interesting and exciting project that was there was surely the Gecko project where one of his workers is a student doing her PhD. This project is about a study on how Geckos are able to stick to a smooth surface with their feet and then be able to reproduce the phenomena with the tools and materials that they have. By doing so, few improvements have been done. A significant example is that it will be possible for a robot that possesses this technology to push a load ten times its weights without slipping thanks to its surface adherence on the floor! The ways that studies are done in Stanford are very different of the University in Switzerland. In fact, students are free to make the project that they want and have specific time to deliver the research. We had also the chance to be given a tour by one of the student studying there in the Design department. She told us about the importance of the customer’s needs on a product. Before starting to make a prototype, it is necessary to ask the customer many questions regarding the design and the processing of the product. Avoiding direct question is primordial knowing that the customer usually doesn’t know himself what he really wants. Berkeley We had the opportunity to visit the campus of Berkeley which is quite different from our schools in Switzerland too. It is really alive, and events such as clubs or sport teams are highly valued and put in the front line. In America, if your studies grades are low but you are an athlete, you will still be able to enter one of the best universities there. On our stay there, we attended two conferences. One of them was about important researcher who presented to us their works (we had the chance to see Mr. Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple). The other one was about an application that would help people with more efficiency after an earthquake but also to let them know where potential risk were.
Switzerland and Innovation
For our first activity in San Francisco, we went to the Swissnex office at the Jackson Square. With a hot Starbucks in the hand, we walked through the Financial District. It allows us to discover the life into this amazing city with its buildings, coffees and famous Cable Car Lines. We arrived at 9 a.m. which was the time of the meeting (Swiss Precision). In the office we met Benjamin Bollmann who is Head of Science Programs & University Affairs for several months. We were kindly received with croissants, orange juice and hot drinks. Then the CEO of the Swissnex San Francisco, Christian Simm, introduced himself and presented to us the main goals of the office. “Swissnex San Francisco connects the dots between Switzerland and North America in science, education, art, and innovation.” – about Swissnex Basically Swissnex is in charge of relying the Switzerland and the Silicon Valley through innovation and new technologies. Moreover the organization helps swiss startups to grow up their business in the US. At the end of his presentation, we had a talk together about the mindset of a typical american entrepreneur. Afterwards, Benjamin guided us to the second floor in order to see all the office. Finishing the visit, we had to hurry up to take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) and then the CalTrain to go to the Downtown of Menlo Park where Swisscom is based. After a quick lunch in the area, we went inside the Swisscom office. There, we were received by the Vice-President, Gregory Leproux. Him and some of his colleagues presented the aim of the company in the US. They talked about the Swisscom Startup Challenge, which is a very interesting contest for swiss startups. Also we had an introduction on the value chain. After this, we directly began an exercise based on this model. We worked by the groups of our startup’s project. Each group made a short presentation of their exercise’s results and then had some feedbacks from the Swisscom’s advisors. Their advices were very helpful for the direction we will take to the projects. Before the sunset, we decided to go back to our hostel in the Downtown of San Francisco. It was our first day visiting companies. We were very happy to meet swiss people at around 10 000 km from home. In a few hours, we learnt a lot about innovation and how competitive have to be the companies in order to stay in the race of success. If we had to resume the day in one sentence, we would say: If you have to fail, fail fast! Karim & Karim
Visiting CA Technologies
CA Technologies is not very known by the public. You might think that it’s only one of many companies in the Silicon Valley that succeeded in software technologies. It is, however, one of the largest independent software corporations in the world ! They have more than 12’000 employees worldwide. Their clients are mainly american companies, that is perhaps the reason that CA only rings a bell but nothing more. We were very luck to be able to visit the CA building, and furthermore, participate in the conferences that were organized for us that day. We arrived, all fourteen of us, in the conference room at the top floor of the building. On the desk, our name tags with a pen and a notebook were waiting for us. Also, not sure if that was the reason, but we had to leave very early that morning and a huge breakfast with coffee was ready for us to eat. And it was awesome. That day we had a total of 4 presentations about Innovation given by very interesting people. The first one was an introduction by Jacob Lamm (executive vice-president of strategy and corporate development) about incubating a business, talking about the Innovator’s dilemna (Clayton Christensen) and also explained what the words disruption and pivot really meant. The second presentation, given by Leonid Igolnik (vice-president of engineering), was about the different types of innovation, and he’s also the person who introduced us to the purple cow and Otaku concepts, which is basically what explains the success of some companies just because they have a product that is presented in an special way. He then explained what the SUCCESs model was. The third presentation was about product management, presented by Ankur Agarwal (Sr Director, DevOps and Cloud Management). We learned about identifying differents markets for the product to be sold, joint development to minimize risk, MVP (Minimum Viable product), and also about an interesting article by Ben Horowitz named Good VS Bad product manager. To finish the day, we had an introduction about the lean startup concept, which is one of the biggest aspects we learned about in those two weeks in San Francisco. We figured out that in the Silicon Valley, the most important thing is to try, because you may succeed only if you do so. That’s why, in the american terminology, you don’t fail, you actually pivot. An interesting concept given by this presentation was the 3P concept : Persevere, pivot or perish. And if you fail, fail fast. Don’t spend too much time or money. We also learned about intrapreneurship, which is was was missing from the big companies before. These companies are so big that it’s really hard for them to innovate in a disruptive way, because they have too much pressure from the stakeholders. This concept allows them to create internal startups with a fixed amount of money (at first), to see if an idea could be transformed into a real life product. These companies sometimes even partner up with competition to minimize the risk. We left CA with our heads full of new information, and went to the Intel Museum, which was a few hundred meters from there.
Two weeks in two minutes
You might be interested into the adventures we had in San Francisco. Well, there is so much to read on this blog, this might be too much for you. So if you only have two minutes available – have a look at our video «Two weeks in two minutes». This will give you the idea, what really was going on over there… It is a condensation of about 60 gb photo and video data, showing all the main points of our trip! Have fun, and before pressing the play button: get ready!
The “Swiss Idea” challenge
As the concluding post of this blog (at least for this academic year), I would like to tell the story about how my students have dealt with the challenge I gave them. The IIM San Francisco study trip was not only an opportunity to visit companies and universities in the Bay Area, but also an opportunity to do “something different” in a very different place. I asked my students to form 3 groups of 4 people and figure out what could be a market need in San Francisco (and more generally in the Bay Area/California/United States) which could be fulfilled with a “Swiss-*” product. The “*” could have been anything related to Swissness, such as technology, branding, know-how, tradition, etc. I gave them full freedom, except the fact that they need to “get out of the building” and talk to people in order to understand the real needs. They could choose the sector before hand, but they had to clean their mind from assumptions and be open to listen to what people needed. I also explained them that “need” means not only problems (pains), but also desires and aspirations (gains). They need to understand how people deal with those needs today and see if there is an opportunity to provide them additional value in exchange of a price for which a profit could be generated. Very simple, but at the same time, very challenging. All that started on Monday 16th (the President’s Day) in the premises of WeWork Golden Gate co-working space in Taylor Street. After a briefing where I explained the terms of the challenge and formed the groups, the teams entered into some brainstorming sessions, before going outside and interviewing people. I told them to try being very open-minded and never jump to the solutions. First, they need to understand the needs and assess both the level of urgency of that need and how many people had that feeling. I also explained that for disruptive innovation, the market size can be small at the beginning, but with a high probability to grow exponentially in the future. As explained by Peter Thiel, founder and CEO of PayPal (and with Swiss origins) in his book Zero to One, being able of “monopolizing” a small but exponentially growing market is key to big success, as it happened for PayPal or for YouTube. The three groups selected each 1-3 sectors to investigate and after 1 hour they were ready to start their first interviews. After few hours they came back to WeWork and debriefed the interviews. I noticed that they started with some assumptions and the interview showed that some of them were wrong, while they also discovered other opportunities that they had not considered before. Back and forth from the street to the meeting room, a the end of the day, for almost all of them it was pretty clear on what to focus and put their creative effort to come up with a “Swiss” solution to a US need. The brainstorming and interviews continued throughout the whole week and the group took the opportunity to discuss about their ideas with the people they met during the visits we organized, such as Y-Combinator, Singularity University CA Technologies, etc. On Tuesday 19th, the 3 teams spent a whole day at Swissnex San Francisco premises, finalizing their market research for the presentations they had to present the morning after in front of a panel of experts of innovation and entrepreneurship. During this day, they also had the chance to talk of Francesco Simoneschi, an Italian entrepreneur and now managing partner at VC fund Mission & Market in San Francisco. Francesco talked about his history as an entrepreneur from Europe to Silicon Valley and how he turned into an investor. He also explained what investors expects from startup founders and how different are the European and US investors landscapes. On Friday 20th, my students were ready to pitch! The panel of expert was made of 3 interns from Swissnex San Francisco, Peter Matthews head of research at CA Technologies and Greg Jorgensen a former VP of marketing at Verisign and now brand management consulting in Silicon Valley. I explained to the panel that there would not be any winning team. They were supposed to provide feedback on the idea and and the way they have performed their market research and collected primary and secondary data. The first team, IdeaSpace, composed of Alizée, Nelsia, Auriana and Mathias O. focused on a problem of startups, namely that of showcasing their products in order to get feedback from potential customers. I think that a good short description of their ideas could be a sort of “Physical KickStarter”, that is physical place, a showroom, where startups can demonstrate their latest products, get feedback and even sell the products to early adopters. I haven’t seen anything like this. The “Swissness” of the idea comes from the Swiss excellence in hospitality and specifically in the organization of great events such as the Geneva Motor Show, World Economic Forum in Davos, or the Montreux Jazz Festival. I was also impressed to see how well the value proposition was illustrated through the use of the Lean Startup validated learning loop. The team learned a fundamental aspect of product development: it is very rare that the first attempt in designing a product will be the right one. Perfection is obtained through iteration over a loop that includes customers in the first place. Only customers can tell when a product is good enough for their needs. And they usually tell you by buying your product! The second team, S-paint, composed of Camille, Veronica, Yohan and Florian, were more focused on technology. They chose a very interesting and somehow serious problem: drought in California. They figured out that absence of rain does not mean that there is no humidity. Humidity can be transformed into water by means of nano-technologies developed in Swiss research institution such as EPFL and ETHZ. These institutions are working on special painting material that can condensate vaporized water when spread over
Timelapse – Discover San Francisco by Night
