Hello Silicon Valley - 17/05/2016
Today was the first visit to Silicon Valley and after some crazy days with fun and intense activities, people had to get up early again to visit some companies. The first company being Gainspeed. Since we drove on regular hours we hit the daily traffic and picked up some delay. Luckily this was all predicted and we arrived in time and started with some coffee (Hooray!).
This presentation started of different than other visits. Since Gainspeed itself was a start-up, they gave us some insight in the funding of start-ups. The first 2 slides alone took about half an hour, since there were many questions being asked, either due to the coffee doing its job or because everyone was interested, my guess is that it is a bit of both. After the interesting and inspiring talk about start-ups they told us how the cable network is distributed in the US and how they want to use that old network, maintain legacy support and improve the performance with their products. After a short break the presentation continued with QA testing, test setups and tools being used for verification. Next we got to see their deployment setup inside the office where they used the products they make to form a cable network and use all the cubicles as households. Finally, they gave us a tour through the engineering lab. The tour included some of their systems being tested and a demonstration about the app and the UI used to remotely access data from the nodes in their network.
Then after a quick lunch we had to head out to our next company, Cisco. We had already visited them once in Toronto so we were looking forward to this next visit. Once we arrived we could see how immense their company was as we drove past a dozen Cisco buildings before we arrived at our destination. Once there we got a couple of presentations, first about the Internet of Everything during which some of our longstanding questions could finally be answered. Secondly about network virtualization and at last we got to talk to one of their Dutch employees, about working at Cisco. The third presentation was more of a conversation and was done in our own beautiful language. During this final conversation we were told how it is to work at Cisco, but also how Silicon Valley is in general. The differences between the way people look at (failed) start-ups in the Netherlands and in Silicon Valley was one of the things we got to talk about, Silicon Valley is much more forgiving in failures and also has a big market for new ideas, which is probably why the area is so popular and flourishing.
Unfortunately, our time was up and we had to move on, since we wanted to make a visit to the Intel museum. Luckily Intel was close and since the museum wasn’t to big we had plenty of time to see some of the history of Intel and the development of their processors.
In the end all of our visits this day gave us a good introduction to Silicon Valley and the culture that they have here. We can only look forward to everything else it has to offer us this trip and in the years to come!
By: Jermain Horsman