After the couple extremely interesting days in Silicon Valley we headed towards San Francisco, visiting Nokia offices in Sunnyvale along the way. We were hosted by Olli Andersson, who’s the Head of Nokia’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center, and Cheng Lee from their Innovation Partner Ecosystem team. During the excursion we discussed the innovation and technology ecosystem in Silicon Valley and got the chance to see their Smart Lab. Nokia really has some interesting technologies, and we’re looking forward to see what happens in the coming years after the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition. Thank you a lot for hosting us!)
Our Transits started to race while coming closer to San Francisco, target being the Golden Gate Bridge. The winning car gave up in last meters, as they had to take a restroom break. At the Golden Gate bridge we got lucky since the sky was almost clear, and there was only a bit of the usual fog (editor's note: fog in San Fran is called Karl and it has its own twitter page: https://twitter.com/KarlTheFog).
After taking tourist pictures we drove back into town and to our hostel. The hostel was quite a downgrade from our last apartments and we were tempted to give them the honour of “Suurtorspo” after the visit. Missing blankets, dead smell in the room, doll heads in closet and empty pizza boxes in rooms wasn’t quite tempting.
In the evening we went to dinner with Mårten Mickos, Senja Larsen, Jutta Urpilainen and Juha Mustonen. Our alumni and the founder of YOU-app Nelli Lähteenmäki and Antti Virolainen, an information networks alumni from Sharetribe also joined the dinner. We had interesting discussions about eg. the life in the Bay area and the differences between Finland and the USA in labour politics. We also had the chance to represent proper teekkarikulttuuri by singing a couple of songs during the dinner.
We started the next morning by visiting McKinsey & Company’s office, which is located on the 47th floor of Bank of America building. Our group has participated in several management consulting excursions in Finland and therefore we had requested some other topic than just recruiting marketing. Delightfully the main topic of the excursion was MGI (McKinsey Global Institute) a topic that most of us were unfamiliar with. MGI is McKinsey’s internal research organization. All associates can be involved in MGI between customer projects and it is also encouraged by the leadership. MGI presentation was continued by a German consultant, who has been working two years at McKinsey. She had participated in 11 customer projects and also a couple of MGI projects. We learned from her experience that MGI projects are of great opportunity to deepen your knowledge in some specific area.
In the afternoon we had booked visits to Alcatraz prison. We decided to walk along the piers to the place where the boat departures, and saw fat and smelly sea lions on the way. They sure had the work-life balance in order. The Alcatraz prison was creepy, as you might expect. We learned interesting facts, for example that 25% of world’s prisoners are inmates in American prisons, which is a huge amount.
On Friday we visited 500 Startups in the morning. 500 Startups is a startup accelerator that also invests in the companies in their program, where for example Nelli’s YOU-app is taking part at the moment. Marvin Liao, a partner of the 500 startups, had a whole lot of experiences and views to share about entrepreneurship and the ecosystem in the Bay area. Also Nelli seemed sincerely happy about participating in the 500 startups accelerator program. It’s certainly something worth considering for all Finnish startups planning to relocate in the Bay area. In the picture we are doing YOU-app's 2-minute plank task!
After a couple of hours break we went to visit Supercell’s office, where we learned about the marketing side of gaming industry. Greg, who’s the head of the office, first showed us the office and told us what they do in SFO, which was followed by a rich discussion and Q&A session as we were enthusiastic to learn more about the company and how it’s like to work there.
In the evening we had dinner together and went to a nearby bar after that. Part of our group enjoyed the evening until morning dawn and lost one shoe along the way.
Next morning we were more than happy to leave the hostel and started making our way towards LA! We chose to drive through Highway 1, which follows the coastline with some astonishing views and beaches. That experience was absolutely worth the somewhat long drive.
We also learned that only the people from countryside call San Francisco “Frisco”, instead really cool guys call it “San Fran”. Naturally we wanted to blend in smoothly and adopted the new nickname.
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