Friday in the Valley

Sorry for the delay in postings, activities that run well into the evening along with 500 games back at our room have detoured me from my blog.

On Friday we headed into San Francisco for a morning visit with Citizen Space. This business is a co-working facility where entrepreneurs can rent out a workspace for $425 dollars per month. One of the coolest aspects of this business is that anybody can come in for a day and use their facilities when vising San Francisco and need to keep their business activities afloat. The people who "rent" here are a very close knit group. Many times their businesses are unrelated but everyone is open to suggestions and shares their experiences openly. Definitely a cool approach to business.

We quickly rushed off across the Bay Bridge towards Pixar, where we were told we had an 11:30 showing and could not be late. Pixar, of course, is a digital animation company that makes movies and has collaborated with Disney on many pictures. Their movies are appropriate for all ages and are awesome for adults. Some movies they have produced are Toy Story, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles and their most recent film was Wall-E. It was a stroke of luck that we were even allowed into Pixar. Our Prof was talking about our trip on a cruise over Christmas break and somebody knew somebody who works for Pixar and got us in! As such with companies such as Google and Apple, you must have some pretty good connections to get into any of these companies.



Aside with touring their campus and seeing all of the artwork with impeccable attention to detail that goes along with creating their characters, their ingenuity impressed me the most. Thousands of ideas are generated each year and everyone is told that their ideas are good, the question is how can they make it great. Thousands of storyboards are written before the movie goes into production. Finding Nemo had over 40,000 slides sketched before it was produced.

Before our tour had ended we saw a short for an upcoming movie that I cannot remember (or probably say because of the NDA anyways) that was very funny and will see when it comes out in four years. Afterwards we ate at the Pixar caf where I took way to much food from the salad bar that was about as extravagant as a salad bar can be.

Our last stop for the day was at MobiTV. This company simply streams live TV to your phone. For instance if you were on the subway this coming Tuesday during Barrack's inauguration you could watch it live on your phone. Pretty awesome huh?! One of the six founders of Tivo who is now with MobiTV gave us a great presentation about life as an entrepreneur, life in the Valley and lots of background about the company. It was one of the most productive meetings we have had on this trip and the view was just as awesome. Located on the top floor of the building, our meeting room was wide open with an awesome view of the Bay.


I will keep the night short because this post is getting lengthy....we basically hung around Union Square. Stephanie held an event at the Clift Hotel which we attended for a while and then checked out more of the square before eating dinner and heading back to the hotel.

Until my next post in about a half hour.