Silicon Valley from within
What I learned visiting Stanford, Facebook, Google & Twitter
A couple of years ago I was starting to get into the whole startup mindset. The turning point I guess was when I read the essays by Paul Graham on ideas like make things people want and the power of the marginal.
Fast forward to winter 2013 when I heard about US Educational Trip. In a split of a second I jumped in the application form. The program focuses on improving education by transferring knowledge and best practices from top-tier US universities to selected greek undergraduates. The application might was lengthy but put me into deep introspection about what I can actively do to change things in education regarding entrepreneurship, such as internships, lab days and hackathons. When I got the mail “you are accepted to Stanford” I was over the moon.
Arriving
After a 15-hour flight via Germany, we arrived at San Francisco where we got picked up by our hosts. The first sign that you are in Silicon Valley is the passive-aggressive billboards on the highway, leased by startups in order to attract engineers or customers. The best one was Y U NO USE HIPCHAT?
Stanford
Stanford University is one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, with the highest undergraduate selectivity and the top position in numerous surveys and rankings. Entering the campus you realize its size. So huge you got to get up early if your class is on the other side and you fancy walking. By chance, the day we arrived was the final day of Holi Festival and we were welcomed by crazy kids soaked in colors and jumping in fountains.
Our days were filled with courses, talks with professors and visits to startups. I had prepared a full schedule of courses I wanted to attend and I distinctly remember the class of EE282 where I realized that the corpus taught was exactly the same as ours back in Greece. However, the teaching was very interactive not in Q&A process. Also, the classroom was equipped with cameras, a control room and microphones hanging from the top. The course was being filmed for online MOOC usage.
A non-conventional engineering course was Engineering For Good: Save the World and Have Fun Doing It (EE46). Terrific title, right? The professor assigns projects with “ immediate and positive impact on the world”. The first hour of the class was dedicated to student presentations where the best team was rewarded with, well, bananas. Later, a visiting lecturer gave a speech about his work on vaccinating Hepatitis-B patients at southeastern Asia.
As a Computer Science major interested in entrepreneurship, I chose some Graduate School of Business courses as well. I don’t know if GSB is the most well-funded department, by it seems the most affluent. It was the only place where the professors were in suits, something inconsistent with the Valley’s extremely casual style (see Zuckerberg’s flip flops). Maybe the most famous business anecdote of Stanford is the $5 and 2 hours story:
What would you do to earn money if all you had was five dollars and two hours? This was the assignment given to students. Most would say “Go to Las Vegas,” or “Buy a lottery ticket.” Some would suggest setting up a car wash or lemonade stand. But the teams that made the most money didn’t use the five dollars at all. They realized that focusing on the money actually framed the problem way too tightly. One group waited at long restaurant lines selling the front spots to busy people. Some students determined that the most valuable asset was their three-minute presentation. They decided to sell it to a company that wanted to recruit the students in the class. The team created a three-minute “commercial” for that company and showed it to the students during the time they would have presented what they had done the prior week.
Apart from the courses, the most important advances in innovation happen inside the university labs. One of the most impressive is the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering where we met prof. Manu Prakash. A restless guy eager to learn about the education problems in Greece eloquently pointing similarities with India. His research is in how organismic biophysics democratize healthcare. We played with an early prototype of a paper microscope, a new approach for mass manufacturing of optical microscopes that are printed-and-folded from a single flat sheet of paper.
Another sunny evening we met prof. Savas Dimopoulos, an acclaimed particle physicist well known for his work on constructing theories beyond the Standard Model. Modest and down-to-earth, when asked how the environment influences his research, he chuckled and said:
every new advancement in physics is like a startup, 10% idea — 90% lab testing.
A non-existent concept in greek universities is interdisciplinary labs.
This is the case of d.school that promotes design thinking in every aspect of business and sciences. It is housed in a minimal industrial building decorated with barely cliché, bold, manifest-like posters that reflect the general attitude of make-build-profit.
At Stanford, the students are highly engaged in all kinds of clubs, teams and groups. The startup vibe is visible everywhere, from dorm bulletin boards to fairs. A very vivid place to witness this bustling atmosphere is the Cool Products Expo, an annual showcase of the best student-made things. Custom game controllers, music creation apps, camera gizmos, car devices, telepresence robots. I noted some trends: many Instagram related stuff such as printing-on-demand services and lenses as well as casual gaming thingies.
Random observations
- many Dropbox t-shirts. (study proposal: correlation of a startup’s t-shirts wear rate with its forthcoming IPO)
- high usage of Zipcar, a car sharing startup. An early indication of the Uber growth.
By night, we were gathering and having fun with the hosts who took up the role of the tour guide. If you expect to have american pie fun at Stanford, please avoid visiting in mid-term season. The most exciting frat party was a bunch of guys playing chess. A chilly evening we were walking by an auditorium when we saw some 300 girls marching in front of us while getting inside. What’s happening here? A pageant? We attempted to get in, but in vain. Later we were told it was a sorority rush. A freshman recruitment process where each girl is trying to get into girl-only houses. Go figure. And I thought Mean Girls was so last decade.
Berkeley
As part of the program, one day was dedicated to Berkeley. UC Berkeley is a public institution located on the east shore of San Francisco Bay, 50km from Stanford. The university is wholly integrated into the city of Berkeley unlike Stanford. Academically, it is so successful that provides even designated parking spots to Nobel Laureates. The campus is built uphill but the distances are short. There is quite a greenery around and the buildings are somewhat pompous. The libraries are really grandiose.
We took a group photo at Sather Gate where, our coordinator joked that he will make a timelapse of these photos of the program every year, watching him age.
You may have seen Sather Gate as background in a Free Speech Movement photo. The Free Speech Movement was a student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of Berkeley. In protests unprecedented in scope, students insisted that the university administration lifts the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom. The group’s primary goals were to promote the ideas of the Cuban Revolution and weaken the Cold War consensus.
It is interesting to draw parallels between the above situation and the current state in most greek universities, where the leading political parties maintain youth branches inside the universities. To make things worse, frequently these branches have strong vocal opinions against student entrepreneurship and companies funding research.
On the 5th day evening we visited Facebook HQs in Menlo Park, a 5min ride from Stanford. On entrance we were issued temporary IDs after we signed a kind of NDA that we will not disclose sensitive stuff. Passing the entrance, a long road is crossing the whole campus, with the buildings surrounding it. It was around 8pm and there were still people working. Even Mark Zuckerberg was there that late, we caught a glimpse of his back. #celebritysighting
After a small tour of the offices, we went straight to the cafeteria for dinner. The cuisine was multinational. Quality food is one of the big startups’ ways of attracting talent.
Around the campus, the hacker culture is apparent and ubiquitous with posters and graffiti. Don’t forget the company’s motto Move Fast and Break Things. Our coordinator, Andreas, facebook employee, said that the in-house hackathons are frequent and an important test bed for new ideas and applications.
70% of hackathon projects are implemented into the core product
Ok. I am a bit biased here. Twitter is a special social medium because I think that the interest graph is more challenging than the acquaintances graph of Facebook. But that’s another story.
Twitter HQs are not in Silicon Valley, but in downtown San Francisco, on the top floors of a high-rise. There, we met @argyris and @kostas, two engineers who talked to us about international growth, big data analysis, statistics optimization, machine learning to discover trends in Search and how to serve tailored results to individuals, localized. We had an enlightening chat about the recent decision to reduce API limits to 3rd party apps as a strategy move to boost in-house apps usage. However, what may be unknown to the public, is the huge research conducted on universities worldwide based on Twitter public data, especially on fields like financial forecasting, sentimental analysis and opinion mining.
That sweet don’t be evil behemoth. I have a test for you. Just count the Google services you use every day. Search, Gmail, Youtube, Android, Chrome, Docs, Maps, Blogger, Translate, Scholar? All of them? Right.
Googleplex is in Mountain View, a 15min ride from Stanford. A neighbourhood-size campus free to wander. Google’s brand is everywhere but not in an obtrusive way. Inside, it’s like a Disneyworld park; bikes, restaurants, foosballs, human-sized androids, beach volley courts, noise, chats. I wondered how one can actually work there.
There, we met @jscud, an engineer who joined Google in 2006, worked at the App Engine Platform and recently transitioned to Ads. I guess that’s a nice allegory of the company’s trajectory through time. Have in mind that a staggering 90% of revenue comes from ads. But Google is not really a search company. It’s a machine-learning company. That’s the long-term bet.
Coursera
I don’t know if the above companies can be called startups while employing thousands of people at vast campuses. On the other hand, there is Coursera, a small technology company with the noble goal to provide universal access to the world’s best education.
Their office is housed in just one floor of a block. Despite their fast global growth, there is still an early stage atmosphere. We had the chance to chat for a while with the founder Andrew Ng, a leading researcher in artificial intelligence.
Our host, Yin Lu, community manager, was fascinated by the popularity of the site in unexpected places, such as Greece. She described some challenges while building the platform, especially when partner universities felt threatened they don’t own the content. The next step was to create their own platforms (see edX).
She was interested in getting some feedback from us, as users. We all agreed that we take up many courses but we complete only a small part of them. A credit — rewarding system could be of use. Later that year, they launched Certificates.
When we were asked if a content localization effort would make sense, we concluded that as non-native speakers, we see Coursera as a window to learn the terminology on each field we study.
As the conversation was ongoing, inevitably there were some questions about revenue and monetization. Apart from issuing certificates, we discussed the idea of using their big data to solve educational research. It’s the first time we can experiment in a classroom of 22 million students.
Valley and People
Silicon Valley, as a state of mind, is based on a bunch of like-minded innovative people who attempt to disrupt industries, building simultaneously big profitable companies. This innovation process involves engineers, scholars, investors, venture capitalists and all kinds of jobs related to tech companies, working together in dorms, basements, garages or co-working spaces. We visited some of them.
Many investors or VCs are constantly on the edge of their seat for new ideas and talent. In a friendly chat over dinner, @bonatsos (Snapchat investor), told us that they invest in teams, not ideas. The initial idea will change eventually. However, the team must be solid. His advice was to look for inefficient industries and try to disrupt them with a data-driven approach. “For example plumbers or technicians.”
One afternoon we were invited in StartX, a non-profit university accelerator. There, Nicolas Kokkalis, an engineer, explained us the secrets of virality and growth on building social products. His applications on Facebook and MySpace attracted more than 20 million users. He underlined the power of piggybacking on fast growing platforms. “Be there as early as possible.”
However, in the Bay Area you may meet engineers devoted to academia as well, not interested in building “products” or startups. On the last day of the trip, our hosts held a party where we met Christos Papadimitriou. He is regarded as one of the top researchers on algorithms, complexity and game theory. When I asked him how someone in the capital of applications decides to explore something so theoretical as computation theory or automata, he paused and said “it’s just my passion. After all, everything comes down to 0s and 1s”.
But Mr. Papadimitriou wears a second hat (and a third as a band member). By night, he is a successful fiction writer. You may have read Logicomix. I was curious to know if his process of fiction writing differs from academic journal authoring. He looks at it as a “creative refuge”. His writing schedule is not structured as well. “I may not write for months”.
Just the beginning
I don’t want to conclude this piece with advice. The above quotes, ideas or stories could act as some. I just want to thank the organizers and our hosts for giving me this eye-opening chance of meeting a couple of like-minded people.
If you are in the middle of your studies in a Greek university studying for a science or business degree, you should apply.
Dimitris Spathis studies Computer Science at Ionian University. He is fascinated by the intersection of code, arts and cognition.
