Enjoying the last days of the trip - Grand Canyon & Las Vegas

After a brief visit in L.A. it was eventually time to leave the beautiful coastline of California and drive to the middle of a desert, to the blazing hot city of Las Vegas. Our first Vegas evening was mostly charging batteries for the next day’s trip so we just had a dinner and a walk in the stunning Las Vegas Strip. An exception were our drivers who made the most of their release from duties, and were also rewarded with a bottle of special Finnish one star drink by the rest of us.

On Thursday, we had an early wake up call. It was time to go to Grand Canyon, one of the greatest landmarks in the whole States. We had decided to carry out the day’s eight hours of driving with four Ford Mustangs, classic sports cars which turned out to be among the most common vehicles on the highway, but still something very special for us Finns. We had also chosen to stop by Hoover Dam which located along the way. After one hour drive from Vegas we arrived at the dam which did amaze us by its size, even though we already knew that everything is much bigger here in the US.                                                                                                                                                                         

In the afternoon we finally arrived at Grand Canyon Visitor Center. After just a couple of minutes’ walk we realized that the drive in the monotonous highway was definitely worth it, a jaw-dropping view of the canyon opened just ahead of us. Carved over millions of years by Colorado River, the Grand Canyon has pretty unbelievable scales. It is 446 kilometers long and 1,857 meters deep, so Finland’s highest fell Halti could easily fit in the canyon by height. Unbelievable! After compulsory group photos and selfies in the first vista point we started proceeding slowly along the canyon edge. Some of our most daring hikers wanted to have a step on every possible overhang we came across, while some others (writer included) more than happily agreed just to take photos from farther off and are still getting stomach cramps just by looking at those pictures. After two hours or so we took a free bus to our parking lot and decided to start heading back to Vegas in order to still have time to go out in the evening. Unlike everyone had imagined, the nature was green at the top of the Grand Canyon (not cracking desert) and even the temperature was at tolerable level. Still, hiking hours at the canyon would require being in a really good shape, and unfortunately much more time than we had today.

After long day on the freeway we returned the cars to the airport whole 20 seconds before the time limit. As the day had been quite tiring, most of us went straight to sleep. Some did go to casinos to try our luck with varying degrees of success. Finally, on our last whole day we switched to full-on vacation mode and went together to experience Las Vegas day-time pool parties. The pool venue Encore at Hard Rock café –casino was a really nice experience with both areas to relax and to party in. After pool party we went back to our apartment and packed our stuff to be ready for departure the next day. But before that there was still the nightlife of Las Vegas to be experienced as a group for the one last time…

To Los Angeles via breathtaking Pacific Coast Highway

Having heard local after another praising the coast, we decided to change our driving route from San Francisco to Los Angeles to go through the glorified Pacific Coast Highway. We, however, pretty quickly realized a major bug in our plans. We had reserved only one day for the whole way down from San Francisco. According to Maps the route was going to take more than ten hours of straight driving, not to mention the breaks. To deal with this, we decided to refund our last night of the San Francisco Hostel, which later on turned out to be a great choice as we came to realize how horrible the place was, and instead decided to bunk one night at a motel halfway down the trip.

Early Saturday morning we crawled out of our beds to head south, most of us still winded from the previous fun evening. As we now had two days to spend for the travel, we decided to have Gilroy Premium Outlets as our first stop. The group’s shopaholics got crazed, whilst some of us parked themselves to the mall’s Starbucks for a good few hours. With cars full of shopping bags we started to approach the coast. We had heard good things about The Seventeen Mile Drive, thus we set our sights to Pebble Beach. After convincing the park officials to consider our Transits as cars rather than buses, we finally saw the first sights of beautiful white sand. The place completely threw us off. The peaceful atmosphere, the thriving golf courses and the endless sea. We laughed about moving there once we retire.

We kept driving south towards our accommodation in San Luis Obispo. The scenery on the route was just magnificent. The pictures speak for themselves. One thing that we didn’t know to expect were the altitude differences. On top of having to keep depressurizing your ears, the sceneries it creates are beautiful. Additionally it gets a little bit scary once in a while when route goes through steep slopes, having a wall of rock on the other side, and a huge drop right next to the windows.

On the second day of the trip we had some more free time - and there is no better place to spend it in than Santa Barbara. During the project it had almost constantly been almost unbearably hot, so it was no wonder people were enthusiastic about getting to the beach. Even though we used sunscreen abundantly, there was no stopping of us white-as-snow Finns getting burnt. A dauntless group of our guys decided to go play beach volley. Only to come back minutes later humbled by the weather. The sand was just too hot to survive in without anything to protect one’s feet.

Just as we were about to continue the drive some of us stumbled upon a baseball batting cage, one just like in the movies. Our departure suffered a slight delay due to it being hard to get the last guys and girls out of the cage... Once we got on the road, we learned the hard way that driving to Los Angeles from Malibu on a Sunday evening is quite a popular pastime. On the bright side, we now had lots of time to admire the grandiose homes the local millionaires had built on the hills!

After two days on the road, we finally arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday evening. Hot weather and two AirBnB apartments were waiting for us. Even though we had prepared ourselves for the huge size of the city, the distances and especially long driving times came as surprise. The L.A. city doesn’t have one central area and for that reason, interesting parts of the city are spread out around the region. On Monday morning, we started our day in Hollywood. Los Angeles is famous for its entertainment business and Hollywood has been the hot spot of film industry especially in the 20th century.  The greatest shine of the city has already gone but there are still many interesting pieces of history left. After walking along the Walk of Fame and checking the Chinese Theater, we jumped into our cars and drove to Hollywood hills. There was a great view to Hollywood sign and a good opportunity to take the mandatory group pictures with the sign.

For the evening, we had reserved tickets to the local baseball match. Los Angeles Dodgers were playing against San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium. For most of us, this was the first time in a baseball game and we didn’t know what to expect. The atmosphere at the stadium was great but soon we noticed that the game is really going to take long. The sport has a very slow tempo and it started to be challenging to maintain the focus in the game after the first few innings (rounds). After nine innings the game was tied and we realized it’s not going to end before one team will more runs than the other in a single inning. After 13 innings we had to give up and leave the stadium. At the apartment we saw that Dodgers had won the game 5-4 in the 14^th inning. The game had lasted 5:29 hours. Besides the match itself the show was very entertaining and our party even got on the big screen in front of 40,000 spectators and was welcomed by the announcer! Our hats might have had something to do with that.

On Tuesday, we woke up early and headed towards our final excursion. The Finnish in-content advertising platform Kiosked has their office near Venice beach where they have moved about two years ago. One of the firm founders, Antti Pasila, clarified us the business environment in L.A. and told the growth story of Kiosked. We felt us very welcomed and it was great to see behind the scenes of one highly successful startup from Finland. In addition to entertainment business, L.A. is well-known as a diverse concentration of popular publishers. Combined with the growing market and lower competition compared to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, it is a good location for marketing businesses. From the Kiosked office, we moved to nearby Venice beach for the rest of the day. Venice beach is popular from its waterfront boardwalk where a great variety of merchandisers have their own stalls and performances. It was easy to spend the time by enjoying the sun, surfing and checking the legendary gym of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Everything official completed, we now had a few days just for leisure. More about that in the next post!

If you are going to San Francisco...

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.

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…!