01/25/2018
Today was a day with beautiful, slightly unexpected sunshine and some pretty interesting experiences with a startup!
The day started with Jacob's book report, covering The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. I found the information from this report very interesting, and almost the easiest to connect to. Guy was an engineer during the early creation of the Macintosh with Apple and worked during the Steve Jobs era. He covered multiple topics in his book in a very condensed way. Some of the highlights from the report are: it is crucial to secure a vision with goals that increase the quality of life, right a wrong, and/or prevent the end of something good. Guy is a big fan of mantra's as opposed to mission statements because they are short and sweet and say exactly what the company does (i.e. Nike's mantra can be deduced to 3 or 4 words, being "authentic athletic performance"). Then the most important part is to actually get going by thinking differently or outside the box as others, polarizing people to either LOVE or HATE your product, and find a few soul mates to truly rely on. He also commented strongly on hiring others that are better than yourself, and gave advice on pitching an idea to a VC by following the 10/20/30 rule.
After this presentation, a few of us walked a fair distance to Golden Gate Park, which I would recommend to anyone visiting San Francisco! There is just so much to do, and with limited time, I definitely wish that I had more time to explore this huge park. Instead we picked the best we could with a limited time frame and went to the Japanese Tea Gardens, and for $9 you can explore this beautiful park, which instills some peaceful, relaxing feels to you as you walk through a unique landscape.
After that, we changed and went to our meeting with Jack and one of the founders of Safe Graph, a startup that focuses on making information and data universally available to all people, and currently provides data in academia and government circles. However, I felt that this company, while having a unique atmosphere in location and office to say the least, being very loud and open to the street, was somewhat lacking some vision and did not really fulfill a market space that was not already occupied by Wikipedia or others. But I did feel like I did gain some knowledge through hearing about their failures and learning from them: being resilient is very important. The most important piece advice that I gained from the founder was surrounding your self by a good, talented team. That can often be the biggest key to being successful. From Jack, I learned how \going out on a whim and having doubts is okay: he told a story of when he applied for a job with Facebook, and how the interviews, technical and otherwise, went well. However, he interviewed with one person who clearly clashed in personalities, and he was declined very quickly. To me, this meant that failures happen, for sometimes the worst reasons, and recovering from them is more important than anything.
One last stop tomorrow, then Alcatraz!
Erik Nelson
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