Posted Sun, 21 Jan: July 11: Headed to Khan Academy 9am, and met Mia who works on adoption of the product at KA's HQ. We were asked to jot down as many ideas on ways to get teenagers to use KA in a few minutes. I came up with a few ideas like peer to peer video lessons and making KA more social through group chats and group study sessions. The people here were amazing! I could tell how much they enjoyed their work and felt inspired to use their product after seeing the passion these people had for their job.

Google was next, and we met with Donald Clark who is a Scottish man living in the states who used to live in NZ. He gave us a detailed perspective on what it is like to be an employee for the massive company, and what we could do to get a job there. The campus was enormous and we only saw a small fraction of it! We visited the Google shop briefly and some of us bought some Google tees and other merchandise.

Last for the day was Inflection. Inflection was and still is one of the leading companies in online security, privacy and information organisation. We got to speak with a Kiwi intern Lachie who explained his journey from NZ to Silicon Valley. Matthew Monahan, the Co-CEO of Inflection then spoke to us about his journey from a small town in the central US to dropping out of college and starting a company with his brother. He came across as a very genuine guy and did not have the scary veil of a CEO that I had expected.

Dinner was at Buck's. Everyone enjoyed stuffing themselves with traditional American food before we headed back to our hotel.

Catch you later,
Liam