Final Meetings in Silicon Valley

Wednesday consisted of a lunch meeting with two young entrepreneurs in Redwood City and a meeting with Jeremiah at Forrester research.

Ani Vallabhaneni is a current entrepreneur who is working with a current Luther grad on a project where the goal of their business is to establish a system where moderate loans between friends can be used without the high interest rates of banks. Him and his partner both worked at Epic Systems when they came up with their idea and moved to California without any connections. They provided us with some great insight on building a networking base here and the benefits of having a startup in the Valley.

After lunch we headed to Forrester Research which is a company that focuses in technology and market research and uses their informaiton to provide advice to many national companies. We met with Jeremiah Owyang, who's focus is on social media, has an interesting blog that you can check out here. He gives a breif overview about what we talked about in his post, "The Obama Generation." Our talk with Jeremiah was one of the more valuable Q&A's we had because many of the things we talked about was software the I use everyday such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blogspot. We talked about creating our image online and ways to secure our identity. One valuable piece of information he gave us was that anything we say or publish online should be written in a form that you could present to you Mom, future wife, and future boss. The internet does have a memory and anything linked to you can be found in the future.