Day 2 in San Francisco

Hi all,

Today we started our day off by visiting callspark.com. We spoke with Steve Larsen. This company is a start up company that is still trying to take off. They are off to a good start though. The product they are developing is a service to provide their customer with an easier way to find and call their contacts. The company is trying to integrate Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, White Pages and LinkedIn in order to more accurately search for the phone number you are trying to find. His main advice was "persistence pays". He also said that to look for employees that will be a one or a two on your scale. One meaning the person is a perfect match for the position and a two means the person would be a good fit if no one else is a number one.

Next we had lunch with Allison from Vark.com. We ate at Suriya Thai Restaurant. I had the Noodles and Broccoli with chicken and a spicy peanut sauce. It was good. Aardvark is the name of the company that is located at vark.com. They are a company that answers your questions. When people sign up for Aardvark they are asked about areas they are know a lot about in order to get a better idea of what questions you would be able to answer. The way the process works is people will enter a question and based on the subject of the question they will send it to a certain person and that person will answer the question. It sounded like the company was starting to take off. She also gave us t-shirts.

After lunch we went shopping for a little while. I went to the Apple Store and Old Navy. Then we had a meeting with Matt Van Horn from Digg.com. Digg.com is a site that rates news articles and the more thumbs up it gets the higher on the page it is. It is place where people can discover and share content and information. Matt's main advice is to be different, stand out and figure out who you want to work for. After you know who you want to work for, see if you have any people that you know that will introduce you to them or if there is someway to make a connect with a person in that company.

Then we went to the SFNewTech. The companies that presented were Apptizer, frog design, RadioWeave, Personal Caregiver, Polka, VeloComputer, and iSpy. What happened was, each of these companies had 5 minutes to talk about their product and after that 5 minutes there was a 5 minute question and answer session. Before the presentation I got to meet many people from different companies. For example I met someone from Ask.com and TripIt. We also got free tacos with admission. It was a very neat event.

Finally we went back to our hotel and a few of us when to In and Out Burger. Then I went to bed.

That is all for today.

Signing off.

Bryan