Monday July 11 - Day Three
Written by Maihi Bennett
Posted Sun, 21 Jan: Today was the official beginning of our visiting to the Silicon Valley companies. We kicked off our day at Khan Academy, I really enjoyed our visit there. I'm a total fan of Khan Academy now and am fully bought in to their vision of, providing a world class education to anyone, anywhere. We went for a tour of their headquarters and then went in to one of the meeting rooms and listened to a presentation. We also done a small exercise which was essentially a type of brainstorm/picking at your brain exercise, it was intense but really fun and highlighted to me the different type of thinking everyone has. One thing that I took away from our visit at Khan Academy was that #youcanlearnanything (You can learn anything!) which was taken from a video at the end our session on.
Then we went to Google and toured the campus! It was amazing, I mean we saw so many of the colourful Google bikes, some electric cars on charge and saw the size of the place, it's huge! There was a real campus like feel at the Googleplex, like everything was so casual and relaxed. It sort of reminded me of university. It was interesting to hear that are over 60,000 employees work for Google and they manage their work really well, work effectively and that their is a real social element that contributed to the companies success. A comment that was made during the tour of Google that really resonated with a lot of us was that it's not about what you know, it's about what you can bring to the table. A lot can be taken from that comment.
Then our final company of the day was Inflection. Which to be honest I hadn't heard of them before, from what I gathered it is like an online security and identity management type business. which is pretty cool. It was very interesting to listen to the conversation about motivation that was had there, and there was an analogy that was spoken of which was the Balcony people and the Basement People. The Balcony people are those people who will help you up and Basement people are those who are trying to drag you down. We also listened to the CEO of Inflection, who spoke about his journey and what things he did in order to achieve in creating this business.
And to finish off our day we went to a place called Bucks for dinner which looked like your classic American diner, had all sorts of things hanging up on the wall and everything that we ordered was BIG. The sunday for dessert was pretty giant as well but it was a choice experience today.
I'm still processing what we did today and need more time to reflect deeply on what was spoken today, what we learnt from today and what we seen.
There is much more to be learnt about during the remainder of this trip so stay tuned whanau.
Nga mihi nui,
Maihi
Then we went to Google and toured the campus! It was amazing, I mean we saw so many of the colourful Google bikes, some electric cars on charge and saw the size of the place, it's huge! There was a real campus like feel at the Googleplex, like everything was so casual and relaxed. It sort of reminded me of university. It was interesting to hear that are over 60,000 employees work for Google and they manage their work really well, work effectively and that their is a real social element that contributed to the companies success. A comment that was made during the tour of Google that really resonated with a lot of us was that it's not about what you know, it's about what you can bring to the table. A lot can be taken from that comment.
Then our final company of the day was Inflection. Which to be honest I hadn't heard of them before, from what I gathered it is like an online security and identity management type business. which is pretty cool. It was very interesting to listen to the conversation about motivation that was had there, and there was an analogy that was spoken of which was the Balcony people and the Basement People. The Balcony people are those people who will help you up and Basement people are those who are trying to drag you down. We also listened to the CEO of Inflection, who spoke about his journey and what things he did in order to achieve in creating this business.
And to finish off our day we went to a place called Bucks for dinner which looked like your classic American diner, had all sorts of things hanging up on the wall and everything that we ordered was BIG. The sunday for dessert was pretty giant as well but it was a choice experience today.
I'm still processing what we did today and need more time to reflect deeply on what was spoken today, what we learnt from today and what we seen.
There is much more to be learnt about during the remainder of this trip so stay tuned whanau.
Nga mihi nui,
Maihi