Apple’s massive HQ: Apple Park
Summary and cool stories about our time at Apple in Cupertino.
Thinking outside the Box
No foul play on words. That’s exactly what we felt when we visited Box, a cloud content management company based in Redwood City, CA. This company was founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith. Levie wasn’t even of legal age at the time. They now have more than 1,800 employees. Thanks to Vincenzo’s contacts, we had the opportunity to spend an hour and a half with Claudio Bartolini, a software architect at Box. He gave us some time to talk about his background, his experience, and the added value that a company like Box brings. We had the chance to know more about the company and how they could deal with a security breach for example. As everyone knows, there is no such thing as zero risks. However, they do everything they can in order to be as secure as possible. In a nutshell, they don’t have big CEO offices, with a top-down hierarchy and fixed schedules. You come to work when you want as long as the job’s done. Coffee and frozen yogurts are free and you can play basketball or PlayStation in the recreation area. The company does everything to make you feel like you’re at home, in order to make you work in an effective way. Thank Claudio, our time at Box was amazing and we really could embody the spirit of Silicon Valley and its new management style.
Prototyping at Stanford University
On 6th February 2018, we visited Stanford University, based in Silicon Valley. Before talking about our journey in one of the most famous university in the world, here is some informations about this amazing place. Stanford University, officially none as Leland Stanford Junior University has been founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford. It has been built after their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., died of typhoid fever when he was 15 years old. Based in California, it’s a private research university which includes three traditional schools of 40 academic departments (undergraduate and graduate level). At the beginning of our day in this place, we went to visit the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. The idea of this first part of our journey was to discover the prototyping space that students of this department use when they are working on their project. As you might know be reading my colleagues’ last articles, the purpose of our trip to San Francisco was to help Swiss companies to innovate their product. Based on that idea, we had the opportunity to use that space, full of tools and materials, in order to create a prototype. After a few minutes dedicated to creativity, we presented our product to the group and gave them a little pitch about it. It would definitely be nice to have such a place in St-Roch campus to let students be more creative and give them a chance to work on their prototype.
DeveloperWeek 2018, a day at geeky paradise
The third weekday of our trip was about developers and everything that developers like to do or see. We took the BART for the second time and, after a really loud trip (i.e. the tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland seems to be designed to make as much noise as possible), we arrived at the Oakland Convention Center where the DeveloperWeek 2018 was taking place. My first impression : “Woaw ! It feels like a geeky paradise…” All of the leading companies in the developer ecosystem were there : Oracle, AWS IoT, SmartSheet, Microsoft, Cloudflare and many others. For some of us, the goal of the day was to collect as much “swag” as possible, each company being really creative about having goodies to bring people to their booth. It’s part of the game and everybody knows it, actually you are offered a “swag collector” (i.e. a bag) as soon as you enter the premise. Beside collecting multiple t-shirts, pens, stickers or other flying toys there were two major interesting things to do : Talk with the people at the booths and get to know more about their products, services and job opportunities Listen to inspiring speakers such as Todd Greene (CEO of PubNub, a network dedicated to building real time apps that scale) or Joshua Bernstein (from Dell) I will not get too much into details about the topics of those talks because that’s not the purpose of this post and also you can find the list of talks on the DevWeek18 website. That was a great opportunity and many of us have had the chance to make contacts that could lead to a collaboration, an internship or a job in the future. For the other ones that weren’t attracted by the technical aspect, it was also important because nowadays tech and business are more and more tied together. Knowing about the top leading products and emerging technologies is, I think, a success criteria.
Design Thinking
The Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design, better known as the d.school, was founded in 2005. The d.school is a hub for innovators at Stanford. Design thinking, i thought, was never the simple culmination of a thousand sticky neon squares, posted and reposted on walls and whiteboards in the loft-style, high-end d.school. But then, what is it for? Design thinking classes are focused on “creating innovators rather than any particular innovation,” and the art of design thinking is best learned by doing. On another d.school webpage, design thinking is defined as “a methodology for innovation that combines creative and analytical approaches and requires collaboration across disciplines.” Among the keys to design thinking is the idea of empathy. Design thinking is understanding your audience before you can create a solution to the problem. If you want to get more information, they publish great articles on medium: https://medium.com/stanford-d-school
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
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
Making a video for StudyBox
After having spent a full day in a coworking space called “we work”, Sabine and Camille had a wonderful idea. What about making a short video to present StudyBox which is a startup created by two HEIG-VD student and which allows students to share their lectures notes. As I am being part of the study trip and one of the cofounder, I loved the idea, so we went for it! Christian who is a very good photographer and an incredible movie maker, accepted to make the girls’ idea possible. Chris is the man behind the camera. The other students agreed as well to be part of the movie and the result is awesome 😉 Have a look at the movie and discover how amazing things can be made within an interdisciplinary team: When business students meets engineer… Enjoy it!