A Fresh Start (up)

I’m just back from our team building event in San Diego, and it was really awesome! Nothing like the cheap stuff that most companies do, but actual fun!

On Monday we went sailing in the San Diego bay, and it was my first time: I was really good with the steering wheel, I’m definitely the daughter of a fisherman . Then we had dinner at an awesome restaurant and finally drank a lot in a karaoke bar…

Today we went to the San Diego zoo (not the one I went to the last time I visited San Diego, but the “Wild Animal Park”, which is a large park / breeding facility) and we went to a safari where we could feed some giraffes! Of course I loved it: most of you know how excited I get when there is a combination of animals and picture spots

All the pictures of my team and the giraffes are here. I definitely want to live on the beach someday; San Diego is pretty awesome for the “surfer style”…

I am exhausted… but delighted! On Thursday and Friday, I was in Chicago to attend my first eBay Live!, the annual gathering of eBay buyers and sellers. I can’t really say a lot about it since it is work-related, but I can tell you that speaking with all those sheer entrepreneurs and passionate people, really inspired me and made me realize even more that I work for a company like no other (and these are my views and not the ones of my company… legal stuff ). In strategic jobs, when you spend most of your time in front of a computer, it is essential to have moment like these to meet with your customers, especially when they are so atypical, to understand clearly the impact of what you are doing on the people that depend on your company to pay their son’s college tuition or to pay their employees. Whether they are happy or not, our customers really care about what we are doing, and this is already a huge motivation factor. Anyway, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to see so much energy, passion and originality gathered in a convention center. All the official eBay pictures are here. And I’m still in love with Chicago!

Yesterday we spent the day in SF with Audrey, doing a lot of shopping . Pictures here. She cooked a delicious “poulet basquaise”, so now I’m obliged to try to reproduce her recipe  for Rémy… He’ll probably be very disappointed

And finally tomorrow I’m heading to San Diego for a 2-day offsite with my team, this is going to be fun, if we don’t get eaten alive by the nice sharks of the San Diego bay!

I am finally not a desperate case! It started really badly though: I arrived 45 min late because my instructor refuses to buy a GPS, and the examinator I got started by saying “oh, you’re from France? I hate France, people are so mean and rude there!”… It turned out that the guy was delighted to see me smile, since he thought that it might be the sign that “new generations are probably France’s last hope”… The guy was actually really nice, and I couldn’t really disagree with what he was saying: I did leave France for a reason! He ended up the conversation by asking me if Carla Bruni was smart, and I was… speechless! So now I’m going to buy a car… without knowing a single thing about cars! Any advice? I want to keep it under $10,000 (used) and ideally be able to resell it.

Well, this week is completely crazy at work, so I’m going to bed now, but just for info I posted an article about the New Media Arts conference on Tech IT Easy here, and an article about a great conference I attended today by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, about customer satisfaction, here.

I should have stayed in bed this morning. Being awfully sick and taking a day off would have been better than that. This morning, on our way to take the bus, we met a really nice drug addict who didn’t want to let us pass; Remy asked the guy really nicely “can you please let us go?” and in exchange, received a punch in the shoulder and in the back. Who said San Jose was the safest city in the US? I’m amazed how quick my brain is in this kind of situation: I pushed the guy away from Remy, and we just ran as fast as we could! Then I called 911; the cop didn’t seem at all impressed by what I was telling and asked me “did you see the guy punching other people? Did he have a gun?”. Since my answer was NO to the 2 questions, she told me nicely “we’ll keep you posted”, meaning “as if we moved our ass for a guy without a gun…”

That wasn’t the end of the bad day, no no no, it would have been too easy! I took my driving test today, of course, as you might guess by the title of this post, I failed, and my driving instructor told me that I chose the worst DMV to take the test, the worst time (lunch time) and that I had the meanest examiner! She told me to turn left, and I couldn’t go on the left lane because there were too many cars, so I stayed on the middle lane to go straight and simply said “sorry, I couldn’t go to the left lane, so where do I go next?” and she replied “if you are asking questions it means that you should learn how to drive before taking the test, now the test is over, go back to the DMV”… Really nice lady, isn’t she?

Hopefully, work was here to entertain me a bit today: with the Yahoo-Google-AOL-Microsoft-Myspace entanglement and all the rumors going around the Valley about this (these) deal(s), it is definitely fun to work in the strategic department of a big Internet company at the moment!

Just a quick post to get your opinion on something that always interests me: innovation. So I would like to know which technology or business model in the tech sector you’ve found the most surprising / interesting / innovative this year, and how it is likely to impact the sector.

My choice is 23andMe, which is, as most of you know, an Internet based service allowing you to read and understand your DNA thanks to your saliva. I heard about them of course because of Google’s investment in this startup, and I find it really interesting because it broadens widely the perimeter of “search” and then the mission of Google of making all the information of the world accessible. The idea of “Googling your genes” was already mentioned in The Google Story from David Vise, and even if a lot of people read it already, I will probably review it on Tech It Easy soon.

Anyway, please let me know your choice for the most interesting technology / business model for 2007, as an “end of the year” gift

I am still a bit obsessed on how companies manage their innovation processes and how they make it fit with their culture. In this context, I recently read an HBS case about Intel research. The “Intel lablets” particularly attracted my attention and raised general questions about the management of innovation. If you want to read my thoughts about these questions on innovation, it’s here on Tech It Easy.

This is it: I’m leaving L.A. on Sunday! It is of course a good occasion to step back and think about the results of this exchange and what has surprised me in general.

Having already been a B-school student, I thought that this Exchange would be valuable mostly for the international experience rather than for the content itself. But, apart from the obvious things (discovering life in a US university, having the occasion of meeting people with very different backgrounds due to the “aggregator” role of universities…) I have really enjoyed spending a term in an MBA program because:

• The courses are much more practical than in Masters program: for example, when dealing with innovation, professors don’t say basic things like “you have to hire creative people” but on the contrary explain all the stages of an innovation program and the different tools to foster innovation based on real companies’ experience because their audience has already dealt with practical problems and want practical solutions.
• The courses are much more interactive: all the students have on average 5 years of professional experience, so it’s usual that they have already been confronted to some situations that we talk about in class and can bring their experience to the discussion.
• People are not here only to enjoy parties and get drunk like in B-school: they have paid a lot to be there and want to make the most of it. Therefore they are really open to networking, and are most of the time delighted when you ask them questions. I have had particularly interesting discussions with people having worked previously in the Internet sector (Yahoo!, AOL, Google…) in senior positions, which is a unique opportunity to understand the career development in this sector. I was afraid that this difference in terms of professional experience would prevent me from being really integrated, but it wasn’t the case: American people really admire Europeans having learned English and ready to bring their knowledge to a US university, so they welcome any insight. I must anyway acknowledge that my year of internship has been really useful in this context, at least to better understand some particular management problems that can’t be considered from an empirical point of view (like resistance to changes, that I have experimented during my internships).
• I have gained a lot of knowledge about the corporate environment in general thanks to a lot (and I mean A LOT) of case studies. Having to read 2 entrepreneurs’ stories every week plus having a guest speaker every 2 weeks gives a better understanding of entrepreneurship than some PowerPoint slides saying “you have to be able to take risks”. Same thing in my course “Technology Management”: I didn’t know anything about the hardware or biotech industry, and now I understand what are the big challenges, and how to compare the different tech industries. Even in the Internet one, I got a more managerial and broader view to analyze the sector. MBA students have most of the time (like in most jobs) been focused on details and come there to get the whole picture on what they’ve done and where they’re going.
• This exchange has also had an unexpected effect. I have been having fun during 3 months  with people that I could have met during recruiting processes, in suit and ties, asking me “what do you think that the company should do if competitor X enters the market with a price lower by 28%? how will the operating margin be affected?”… It has allowed me to clearly acknowledge that after 5 years of professional experience, these people know a lot more than I do, but that it doesn’t mean that I don’t have a chance to impress them by showing some maturity and an organized reasoning, because I have shown during group meetings that I was up to the task.

And I will finish this post with  a quote that I will remember forever mentioned by my Entrepreneurship professor:

“Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

So simply let your music play!

I feel really ashamed that I haven’t updated this blog for weeks, and I apologize sincerely to my (few) readers who doesn’t find here any updates. I have the impression that the more exciting my life is, the less lively this blog is. The thing is that I would have plenty of things to say, but I don’t find the time, or don’t try hard enough.

The courses at UCLA are very demanding but still really interesting, and I am starting to work on my final projects.  In Technology management I am analyzing the VoIP market, in Global Operations Strategy I will study the digitization of entertainment industries and in Corporate Entrepreneurship my project is to compare Google and eBay in terms of innovation strategy. So you can guess that I have a lot of material to cover, especially since I also have to make progress on my thesis about “Internet and the democratization of contemporary art”. But OK, I acknowledge that I am obviously looking for excuses, because I manage to find some time to travel (San Diego was great!) so I should find some time to blog!

I am also really busy preparing my relocation, and I still hesitate in going back to Silicon Valley for one week end to find a place to live before coming back to France for Christmas. Otherwise I would have to find a temporary housing in January, and this is a nightmare

This is it, I promise I’ll try to share the great lessons of my final projects with you soon

Update: I forgot the most important: I bought an iPod Touch! After long hesitations between the iPhone and the iPod Touch, I realized that it is before all having a cool wifi device that interested me the most, and the iPod Touch provided it without being obliged to accept the deal with AT&T and without paying $500 deposit! And of course now I can’t stop playing with it

My boyfriend, who is a software and web developer, has launched his first Facebook application (like every developer at the moment ;-)) a week ago. It is called “If I were” and allow you to create your Chinese portrait to display on your profile and to guess your friends’ portrait to see if you know them well. He has reached today 700 users, which is a pretty good number. You can learn everything about the conception, the development and the launch of this application here on Tech IT Easy. It is particularly amazing to have first-hand data about the famous “network effect”.

Of course, this article is everything but neutral, so I acknowledge that I would be glad if you could try this app and give me (or him on Tech IT Easy) feedback about it.

My boyfriend is also looking for a job in Silicon Valley, starting in January, so if you know some companies that might be interested, do not hesitate to tell me

It’s always difficult to speak about my expatriation, to communicate what surprises me, what I like and dislike about it on an ongoing basis on this blog, because it would generate really short articles about some silly things. Twitter would be the ideal way to do that but as most of my friends are not geeks, I know that I don’t reach the people I want with this medium. So I decided to make regular updates gathering all the news and practical details of my expatriation, my opinions and feelings about it. It is particularly important for me since I use expats’ blogs a lot, to discover great things to do, to understand some cultural aspects, or simply to know how to get my Internet access repaired in this country! So, in bulk:

• I love studying in the US, because I realized I really lacked some concrete experience about the fields I am studying. I get to listen to business angels, VCs, entrepreneurs, corporate entrepreneurs, innovation directors… and I simply love it, because I put a face on these functions and I mitigate my thoughts and stereotypes.
• L.A. has plenty of advantages (amazing weather, both great cultural and night life, great entertainment, lovely areas…) but a big drawback: it’s huge. As my budget didn’t allow me to rent a car for 3 months, I am obliged to plan days in advance what I want to do, because you can’t simply wake up one morning and go to downtown, because you have to remember that it is at least 1hr30min bus drive to go there. I have no impression of “knowing” L.A. as I can’t do multiple things in the same day, so I can’t manage to “connect” the different places I go to. Fortunately my neighborhood is one of the nicest (Westwood, between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills ;-))
• Today is Halloween, and it’s a big deal here, but it has been celebrated everywhere for a week now (you can see my costume of devil here)… Originally I thought that Halloween was supposed to be scary, but it is in fact the equivalent of Mardi Gras… And most women (at least in L.A.) preferred the sexy costume than the scary one!
• I kept the best part for the end: I just accepted an offer to work as a Business Analyst for the Marketplaces Strategy team of eBay in San Jose, California (headquarters), and I will start working there in January. Obviously I’m delighted, especially since I enjoyed my internship at eBay France, but also because it’s a great opportunity to discover the challenging environment of Silicon Valley, and to work with the best people of the sector, all sharing the same amazing corporate culture. I would have so many great things to say about eBay (the core values, the amazing portfolio, the great challenges to face, the vision, the campus…ok I stop now) but I have decided that it will be the only time I will speak about it. There are a lot of legal aspects involved when blogging about the company you’re working for, and the limit between what you can say or not is often really vague. I will of course share my knowledge of the Internet sector and what I will learn by interacting with bloggers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, but I won’t say a word anymore about eBay itself.
• My boyfriend also has to find some work in Silicon Valley, so if you know a company needing a top notch software engineer and having no problem in sponsoring visas, please let me know, that’d be great!
• I will move to Silicon Valley in January, and have to find a place to live: I’m hesitating between living in San Jose to be close to eBay or finding a nicer area… If you have any advice then do no not hesitate! I think I will try to rent a place for one month to give me time to find my “ideal apartment”.

That’s it, I will keep you posted about the many practical things I will have to overcome to settle down