by Hugo Ramos  on Tue 19 Apr - 0 Comments
Categories: Career Trek Blogs

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The Silicon Valley trek was one of the best professional experiences I had during my MBA. It was organized superbly! The speakers, companies and all the rest of the details were perfect.

These were for me the highlights of each visit in a sentence:

• VMware: Cloud computing company. Even though it’s a big company we met with a very interesting entrepreneur who had joined the company after selling his company. He transmitted a great entrepreneurial culture.
• Tesla motors: intense conversations about the challenges of changing such a big industry. Getting into the cool cars.
• IDEO: we met a very charismatic Spanish guy who told us about how they work inside, intensively and very creatively. We saw the cart from the IDEO case.
• LinkedIn: great presentation about how LinkedIn makes money and cool new features and products they are working on
• Google: we parked on lady Gaga’s spot! We spoke and took pictures with the CFO, we asked him what even we wanted. We had lunch at the plex
• KPCB: we threw question after question to one of the partners, and John Doer came to say hi.
• Nintendo: we got to review their strategy going forwards and we played with their new 3D mobile game, it had launched the day before.
• Apple: we visited the mother ship, even though this is not allowed anymore. There are lots of secrets inside apple, but we got a good look at iTunes business.
• August capital: the partner that met with us is legendary, he was one of the first investors in Microsoft and told us cool stories from the old days of the valley.
• WSGR: We got a really experience lawyer to answer all of our questions. Yes, they are a very important part of the food chain in the valley.
• We went for beers with the guys from Path and LOLapps, who told us about early stage startups
• Zynga: impressive offices, cool to know it was founded by an MBA and that they hire LBS people
• Intel: great to see the new projects their working on and their VC side. The museum was interesting too.
• Plug N Play: we met some very interesting characters here, who gave us the pros and cons of incubators
• Prof. Jack Fuchs: very interesting and helpful professor and entrepreneur, who spend time answering questions and telling us about starting up your company.