Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford

The highlight of this week was undoubtedly the "Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford" event. To give you a little bit of background, for the past 2 years, Oxford invites some of the most successfull entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to come and spend a day with the students at Said. This can take the form of Master Classes ( sessions held by them) or Garage sessions (where the students collectively provide ideas on which these guys can then go and act).This year we had Chris Sacca (Head of Special Initiatives, Google) who is in charge of Picasa, Orkut, Google Earth, Google Trends and WiFi, Reid Hoffman ( Founder , LinkedIn), Matt Cohler (VP Strategy, FaceBook), Allen Morgan (MD, Mayfield Venture Capital), Julie Hanna Farris (Founder, Scalix), Mike Malone (Former Editor, Forbes ASAP and columnist for Silicon Insider) and others. Classes were cleared for half a day to enable us to attend these sessions. I opted for a masterclass presentation by Chris Sacca (extremely entertaining)[ He obviously hates MBAs(we talk too much, we need to make everything complex, we think small and not big..and so on..)...As he very succintly put it " In Google, if you want to be really helpful, just get out of the Geeks' way" or" In Google , we are never more that 150 mtrs away from food!!!"] and a Garage Session run by Synectics for Google.The garage session basically provided a lot of insights from about 20 of us and Chris refers to it in his blog entry.. Lots of insights were shared and it is good to hear privileged information straight from the horses mouth, so to speak.We ended with a panel discussion.
In other news this week, we have finally given up sleeping!!! Hallelujah...Its just that there are now extremely fascinating things like assignments to be submitted and enthralling/thrilling course books to study for the oh-so-wonderful exams coming up in 3 weeks time..Oh yes, please pile it on!!We are now suckers for punishment....

"Please Sir, Can I have some more???"

Cheers till next week or rather, till something momentous takes place!!!!