pjinthevalley's posterous http://pjinthevalley.posterous.com Most recent posts at pjinthevalley's posterous posterous.com Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:19:59 -0700 Day Zero to Day Three http://pjinthevalley.posterous.com/day-zero-to-day-three http://pjinthevalley.posterous.com/day-zero-to-day-three And it so it begins.....

After many, many hours flying I finally landed in San Francisco. How many hours? Im too tired to do the math but think it works out at longer than a full day. So, a lot of hours.

Day One: Wednesday

My entry to the states was less than ideal with Visa issues from my previous visit. This was easily resolved with a cheeky bribe and I was on my way...if only. Half an hour sitting around and many questions later I was free to go but given a warning to sort it all out.

Jet lagged, hungry and a bit disorientated I made my way over to my accommodation. Something I had sorted out through AirBnB it was a house shared by owners of two companies. Very cool. Nice guys, own room, and they even made me lunch! Can life get any better? After a couple of chats one of my hosts, Cameron, opted to show me round. We headed down to California Avenue where she showed me the local sites. All very cool. A quick trip to frys (electronics mega store) and I had myself a cellphone. $45, with enough credit to last the trip. Not bad huh? 

En route we visited the WePay office. These guys are pretty remarkable. Having raised $8mil they're two guys who are going to try and take on Paypal, but for group payments. So far they have approximately 12 employees.

We heading back to the house and although I had planned on catching Mark Suster talk at Stanford I was way too tired. Rather I opted for just relaxing and then a walk down to University Avenue. It is (arguably) the hub of Silicon Valley and walking the streets was very interesting. A couple of beers and pizza slices later, I grabbed the Stanford bus and made my way back to the house. Tired and full, I crashed out.

Day Two: Thursday

After a good sleep (but still feeling very tired) I awoke to big decisions. Sightseeing in the City of wasting away the afternoon around the Valley. The thought of over a hour or trains was not appealing and so I opted for the more relaxed Valley option. I grabbed my laptop and headed to Castro St. Castro St is another hub of the area (in Mountain View). I headed there and spent some time in Red Rock cafe. I would've felt out of place had I not been in the cafe on a laptop. A few hours spent walking around this area/drinking coffee I then made my way back up to University Av. Got some dinner (sushi), had some beers, and then heading back to my accommodation. I pulled on a shirt, some jeans, and heading to Microsoft.

There I attended a Churchill Club event. Beyond the obligatory schmoozing, I was there for a talk:

All in all very interesting and thought-provocative. The discussions were mainly centered around the ideas of government restriction on entrepreneurship and the innovation coming out of china and the like. Went back to the house, went and had a couple of beers at the Nut House and then sleep. Good day.

Day Three: Friday (Today)

Got up, packed my bag. Is my last day in the hacker house and moving to stay with a guy named Kiran. He writes Iphone apps. Should be interesting. Got the train to Mountain View and after a 2 mile hike arrived at the Google Campus. All I can say is, WOW. This place is huge and just generally awesome.

After checking in grabbed a free drink from the fridge and we toured. Didn't see much but got a good idea of what the place is like. Went and then grabbed some lunch. The lunch hall was cool, any food you want, any drink you want, any ice-cream you want. I had pizza... and a mango smoothie. After meeting a few people left after lunch and called my friend Craig (first employee of Google). Had an interesting chat to him for about 25 minutes before leaving and coming here to this cafe. Just to give you an idea, he wrote most of the code of the original Google. Pretty cool. 

Tonight, I'll have some drinks. Ill maybe go to a party. Tomorrow's going to be a big day.

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