First of all, I’m sorry for not writing last week. I had a full weekend and then a super intense week. On the bright side, I now have lots of great things & learnings to share.

Let me start by telling you about my amazing weekend at the Yosemite National Park. It was the first time in my life, that I spent a weekend so engaged with nature and completely disconnected. No cellphone service and a really bad internet connection that only worked for a few minutes a day. So, this ended up being a weekend to think and reflected about the previous weeks, read a lot, have some very good conversations and enjoy the silence and quite of nature. I definitely want to do this more often and find moments where I can disconnect from the virtual world and really connect with the real world.

We came back from Yosemite National Park and spent the 5th week of the program in workshops and taking care of team definition. This was a long and exhausting process for everyone. Finding the right team and the idea you are passionated about is always very difficult. After some struggle the teams were formed and we spent the weekend working on our projects with a very clear goal: On Sunday we need to pitch our project to our colleagues and a group of investors. While stressful we all had lots of fun and we definitely learnt a lot. It’s always great to have limited time because it allow us to push the envelop and expand our boundaries.

My team, whose focus is on Gender Equity, end up winning the People’s Choice Award. Yay!!

Two talks marked this 5th week: First I had the chance to attend a Startup Grind event at Google with Vinod Klosha. He is the founder of Sun Microsystems and one of the most successful investors in the Valley. His message: Focus on your team and culture. As an investors he spends 50% of his time recruiting for the companies in his portfolio. He says there is nothing more important than attracting great talent to make sure you keep the DNA of your company. Really great insights.

Then, on the same night David Roberts who is the Graduate Studies Program Director share his life story, on entrepreneurship, making and losing a lot of money and making decisions. Life changing.

On July 22, I celebrated my 24th birthday. While I was exhausted because of the weekend, I was always super excited because I had great plans. I first went to Mozilla where Pascal Finette gave us a tour of the office and sit down with us for an amazing conversation about Mozilla, entrepreneurship and life. I really learned a lot.

Then, I went to Facebook where I had lunch with my new Mexican friend Marco Alvarez. Facebook is amazing. Beautiful, comfortable and open. I even had the chance to see Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. How cool is that?!!

Then on Tuesday, I got back to work with some workshops on Lean Startup in the middle and lots of brainstorming and decision making. On Thursday, Ray Kurzweil visited us and talked about the future and his work. It’s unbelievable how intelligent he is.

After such intense 2 weeks I really needed a relaxing weekend. On Saturday, went to Stanford and was impress about how big and beautiful it is. Today, I had lunch with a friend in Palo Alto, went to the Apple store and then came back to NASA to read and relax. Can’t wait to see what is going to happen this week. Great challenges ahea