One of the benefits of being an MBA student is access to visit companies and Fuqua headed out San Francisco and did just that.

Wednesday 1/4/12

Visited NetApp in the morning and I have to say there buildings are really nice.  We met with the VP of Products as well as the EVP of Customer Advocacy.  My two favorite quotes/statements from the morning were:

“Remember that innovation doesn’t just happen in startups”

“…Storage can be boring…No one wants to talk about it for an hour but the problems we are solving are not…”

Next we visited eBay and boy were they excited to see us.  Here is a picture of us out in front.  They also gave away cool swag so large shout out to eBay.  Some of the numbers regarding the volume of eCommerce transactions on their platform were incredible and the revenue splits from Paypal really speak to the changing face of online payments.  (Great space to be in right now)

Thursday 1/5/12

Who would have ever thought that Autodesk was such a cool company?  For those of you in the San Francisco area I fully recommend visiting their museum which is open to the public on Wednesday’s.  http://usa.autodesk.com/gallery/

Also the former Yahoo CEO came from Autodesk and while you may debate how well that worked out, the products Autodesk is creating makes them more than just a CAD company.

Friday 1/6/12

First things first… Google!  The Mountain View campus is amazing and it still really feels like a college campus.  I did however hear that the head chef left Google to go to Facebook.  Tough problems

Next we went to Electronic Arts.  We were joined by Texas McCombs and USC Marshall School’s of Business.  We got super luck and had two one hour talks with CEO John Riccitiello and COO Peter Moore.  All I can say was wow.  Never have I had such close access and QA with executives like this and they delivered on every aspect of the time we had with them.  I can’t say thanks enough to EA for putting this together for us.

Fun Fact – John Riccitiello has a 150 Gigabit/second internet connection into his house.

The last minute addition was Apple.  Chip Hills the Vice President of China Operations and former Vice President of iPhone Operations took over an hour of QA with our group.  All the way up until he caught his flight back home for the weekend.

Fun QA portion:

Q:  “What technologies are you really excited about right now”

A:  “I am excited about a lot of cool stuff but none that I can share…”

Quote:

“When I’m walking through Jonathan Ive’s studio and I see all the new technologies I just say, wow”With that I visited this Sushi place,Yakko Japanese Restaurant,and took the red eye home.  San Francisco, I will be back!