Mid-trip recap on learnings along the way

Prodeko Goes USA trip is now half way through and we thought it would be a good time to sit down and take a good look at what we have learned along the way. Even though this isn't the first time in the US for many of us, this trip has truely broadened our horizons. The discussions with local entrepreneurs and tech leaders have definitively given us new insights into the local work culture, American lifestyle and mindset. Here are some of our key findings and learnings:

1) The workforce is a lot more mobile than in Finland

Workers and employers don't often sign official contracts on labour over here. Instead, they agree on the job with a "Employment at will" relationship that gives both the employer and the employee the right to end the relationship whenever they want without any warning. Thus, situations where employees get fired and start packing up their belongings,  (what we Finns tend to see only in movies), is the reality over here.

This on the other hand diminishes the risk of employing someone significantly but at the same time recruiting takes a huge amount of time as people change jobs in as short periods as six months. The situation that management consulting companies struggle with in Finland is the everyday reality here in every organization.

In addition, most people live in multiple place in the US during different periods of life. You might be born in Texas, study in Minnesota and start working in North Carolina. Compare that to Europe where it still is more of an exception to study or work outside of one's home country. The effect on labour mobility is huge.

We have tried to copy the American mobility by travelling hundreds of miles in our twelve-seat Transits ;)

2) Productivity and number of innovations aren't growing as quickly as it seems

We had a very interesting discussion with Edmund Phelps in Columbia University. According to his research, the American society hasn't been able increase its productivity during the past ten years and innovativeness is actually decreasing. ICT sector is doing well, but most of the other industries are struggling with the problem of how to come up with new products and solutions with the resources they have. This was a surprising point-of-view as the European media tends to mostly write about the economic growth and recovery in the US.

3) Americans like to get things started and done

Meetings with Finns who have relocated here have given us multiple new insights. For example, many have praised the American way of getting straight into business instead of having useless meetings and calls at first. Things tend to also move quickly. If you meet a potential customer at lunch on Friday, they might already require first offers and designs next Monday. Agility is definitively required.

Not everything is better though. For example, some have expressed their frustration to "face time" culture which seems to be present in at least some organizations. Face time means that employees hesitate to leave their office even though they wouldn't have anything relevant to do, since they want their employees to think they are committed and hard working.

Looking forward to the next ten days!

We Finns probably misunderstood the face-time as Facebook-time.

Exploring the entrepreneurial spirit in the sunny Silicon Valley

Sunday 23.8.

We had an early sunday morning flight to San Francisco where we first headed to car rental and drove with two minibuses to eat lunch at Palo Alto. We went to a burger place called the Counter, where you could choose how your burger will be built. Many of us ordered a burger with one pound patty and no one had any troubles finishing their burgers. With full stomachs we drove to our accommodations in San Jose and Santa Clara. There was a small turf war over Santa Clara apartment, which was equipped with a nice backyard and a pool.

Rest of the day we enjoyed the sun and prepared some hotdogs.

One pound burger

Monday 24.8.

On Monday morning we drove Mountain View to visit Google campus, where Google HQ is located. A fellow Prodekoman, Juhana was there to greet us. Juhana's colleague Theresa gave as an informative round tour around the large campus. Out of the 55 000 employees of Google Inc., 13 000 are seated on Google campus area. The campus was colourful and spacious with nice architectural solutions: one building was built tilted so that the wind conditions on the volley ball field nearby would be optimal. We also had the pleasure to meet Stan, the real Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton who is the target of small pranks of the employees.

It was great to see the famous campus of Google, thanks to Juhana for organizing us the round tour!

Pure happiness

Later in the afternoon we had the pleasure to visit Idean, a Finnish design company that has been active in the US around five years. During this time, it has established a strong market presence in the States – over 60 employees out of 150 are based in the US. Idean is a global design firm that offers its customers user interface, user experience, interaction, visual and service design, front-end development, app development and user research services. It has been founded in 1999 in Finland.

Idean’s office was a cute wooden house with a nice backyard, where the company also hosts garden parties. The founders, CEO Risto Lähdesmäki and CDO Jesse Maula told us the story behind Idean and gave their view on what it has been like to establish a market position in the U.S. According to them, Silicon Valley is the place to be for companies: 90% of all the VC money in the world is located in SV and there are talented workers moving to the city all the time. Idean has faced high competition in Silicon Valley, but has been very successful by doing projects efficiently and with high quality. Finnish knowledge has been appreciated in the US. For the design industry, the golden ages are happening right now. Top management of companies have realized the value of design and there exists a need for companies like Idean. Silicon Valley is becoming more and more expensive all the time, and the next tech-hub is already building up in Austin, Texas.

It was interesting hear how a Finnish company has managed to expand in the US. Thank you Idean for hosting us!

After the excursions it was time to go shopping. We drove to the Great Mall nearby. Two hours in the enormous world of retail was a bit overwhelming and exhausting for us, but some of us made some really nice deals.

Tuesday 25.8.

On Tuesday, our schedule started with a visit to Stanford University, the place from which many famous entrepreneurs have gained their academic knowledge. At Stanford, Mark Nelson and Timo Nyberg hosted us and we had a pleasure to attend an innovation workshop with them. The aim of the workshop was to teach us rapid prototyping in the context of joint ventures. Since this Stanford visit was the only official part of the day, we had a bit time for a tour around the Stanford campus after the workshop. We e.g. got to see how the Stanford Solar car project is proceeding.

Since the schedule during the first days on our trip was quite busy, it was nice to have a free afternoon and evening to chill out a bit and to enjoy a warm sunny day in California. To enjoy the free time the most, we decided to take benefit of the local basketball courts and football fields. In addition, we exploited this rare opportunity to arrange a BBQ party at our place to build up team spirit and to plan the agenda for the rest of the trip.

Seattle - work and play in the Emerald City

This blog post is a little longer, describing our time in Seattle with two approaches: formal program & informal activities. Work hard, play hard!

WORK

Microsoft

First up in Seattle we had Microsoft and its headquarters, hosted by the General Manager in Customer Logistics, Dave Warrick, a cheery Irishman with a tendency to answer any question more than thoroughly. The day started out with a bus ride, provided by the most legendary driver giving us a tailor-made sightseeing experience. In exchange, we sang a song to him to the amusement of other commuters lucky enough to be onboard the same vehicle.

Xbox & NHL15 - "How to attract IEM students 101"

We reached the campus, a city in and of itself. Over 45 000 Microsoft employees do their job there. Our target was Studio B, and after everyone had presented themselves Dave told us about Microsoft with such enthusiasm and detailed stories about the people working there that we could not help but get really excited ourselves, too. Afterwards we had an absolutely thrilling discussion with the people of Microsoft giving really interesting insights into various subjects from their points of view.

A group of us had something to be anxious, or excited, about: presenting their case study to Dave & co! The rest is history, but tales tell that the feedback that was received was pretty useful for all of us. 

We did have something all of us were really looking forward to, though: a visit to the Envisioning Center, the place where the future is being presented. A funny coincidence: there were other finnish people visiting the executive center at the same time, the VTT! The things we saw at the Envisioning Center we cannot share, but one thing's for sure: there was some pretty cool stuff.

Later on in the evening we had a fabulous dinner with as many as 10 people hosting us at a local restaurant. The Fillet Mignon was beyond imagination... Many fascinating conversations were being had and acquaintances made. This also resulted in an invitation for Saturday, of which more stories will be told in the adjacent “free time” blog post.

The day was, all in all, a great success! A huge thank you to our hosts at Microsoft!

Boeing & Galvanize Seattle

Jeff Plant, Chief Process Architect, Commercial Airplanes, receiving his present

On the following day we had the honor of visiting Boeing. It started with a nice surprise: we received greetings in Finnish from an experienced Boeing employee who had moved from Finland nearly 40 years ago and worked at the firm for 20 years. We were also given a good overview of the company. We got insightful answers to our numerous questions, such as how an airplane manufacturer deals with a delayed r&d and delivery project. The crown jewel of our visit was the manufacturing hall, though: the largest building in the world by volume, where new Boeing aeroplanes are being produced at a surprisingly fast pace. To see the building and assembly process in real life was a dream come true for a great part of our team. The scale of everything was astonishing, ranging from the tools to the engines of the new planes.

Right after Boeing we headed for something completely different: a startup coworking space in downtown Seattle, Galvanize. The transit there did not go entirely according to our plans; Uber's servers went down for some 20 minutes, which resulted in some surprising charges appearing afterwards. Anyway, we were wished warmly welcome and after being given a tour in the brand new working spaces in which also courses on computer science are given, we found ourselves on a brilliant rooftop hangout area with refreshments (some of which were finished pretty soon after our arrival). Our list of rooftops visited on this trip was growing! New connections and friendships were made during the afternoon and early evening. 

PLAY

We left New York in two separate batches and the first group had an unpleasantly early fight, having to wake up at 3am. Despite the hurry in the morning, everyone got to the airport in time. The other group got to sleep a couple of hours longer so they didn’t have to rush their morning. After layovers in Cincinnati and Chicago, the whole project team arrived safely in Seattle. 

The first night in Seattle was all freetime, including dinners and beers around the city in smaller groups. Quite a few people also took advantage of the washing machine in the hostel. By the end of the evening we had also acquired a proper “torspo” -symbol, which was handed to Joona - rest of the story may well stay within our team. The torspo-symbol is a green monkey, a mascot of Seattle Sounders, and it was immediately considered to be a bit too cute to be a “punishment”.

After the excursions of Thursday we headed to the hostel for a power-nap and then to a bar to grab a beer before the dinner. The bar had also an own brewery and some twenty local beers on tap, which were definitely worth tasting! After the dinner some of us decided to check out Seattle’s nightlife and headed to Capitol Hill, recommended by locals. Probably needless to say that the night went on for quite a while. Team Capitol Hill got also quite confused of Washington state liquor legislation.

Saturday was fully free of any excursions and people could do anything they wanted. Some of us went for a morning jog and a quick swim in the Lake Washington whereas some headed straight to the city. Pike Place Market was a popular attraction among our group, everyone made at least a quick visit to the neighborhood of the original starbucks cafe. Another popular activity was shopping in the huge malls downtown, and by the time we gathered in the evening, most of us had some bags of newly purchased clothes with them. At 6pm we had booked tickets to the famous Space Needle where we got some pretty cool pictures of Seattle from almost 200 meters above of the ground.

After the Needle we continued for rooftop drinks, since a Microsoft employee had invited us for an event she was organizing at the rooftop of her apartment. And the roof.. There aren’t words to impress our reactions when we saw the roof terrace. It was big enough to fit at least a hundred people, maybe even two hundred. It had two barbecues and several gas heated lamps, as well as a gas heated fire pit. The terrace had views not only to the sea, but also to the Space Needle and the downtown. We all were able to take some great pictures of the surrounding city as well as other people on the terrace. There were also a bunch of people from Microsoft at the party so we had a great opportunity to continue our chats from Thursday. Later that evening also the 240 red cups turned out to be quite useful… Our host was also very delighted from our present (bottle of Finlandia) and especially loved the way we handed it alongside a proper song (hyvät ystävät).

All in all, Seattle was a great city and many of us liked it even better than New York. Definitely worth a visit, if you are going somewhere near it! Unfortunately our visit was quite short and we had to squeeze our touristing basically into only one day. The city does however offer a great variety of working places, so maybe some of us will end up their later again, who knows. Microsoft, Boeing & Amazon are large employers in the area, and many other tech firms such as Apple, Google and Alibaba are strengthening their presence in Seattle.

All good things come to an end, and so we headed for Bay Area with a painfully early flight. Right now we’re at our AirBnB accommodation at Santa Clara. Looks like this stage of our journey is going to be equally awesome, so stay tuned…!