Personal Log Earth Date 10-26-5774,
Back in the home office on a Saturday morning.
The bridge looks very different this week.
Rumor has it that it will clear up in a couple hours and we’ll have another beautiful weekend.
I thought week 3 would slow down a bit at 500 but guess what? It didn’t…
So, what did we have this week?
Monday kicked off with the weekly batch meeting. We are still showing up to these. I don’t think that will last much longer. Star of the meeting this week was Greg. If I am not mistaken he was fighting a stomach ache here after trying to talk about general solicitation…
Then there was a strange man limping around the office offering us candy. Strange happenings at 500:
Mike Curtis from AirBNB dropped in on Tuesday afternoon and shared some words of wisdom about AirBNB culture & innovation.
Mike had some great pointers. I caught up with him after his presentation. Sounds like a lot of their plans for 2014 are focused on personalization. Very aligned with OLSET’s strategy in the hospitality business. We’ll see if we can do something together. We filed our process, technology and algorithm patents in these areas this week – woohoo!
We had a bunch more mentor meetings this week. Tony Adam provided great insights on SEM, SEO and content marketing. Stephen Wendel gave us good pointers on measurement, peoples’ behavior and traveler engagement and James Levine had good insights into marketing spend & our ability to compete. James also showed us that he can give good advice while getting shot:
OK, I might have meant getting a flu shot…
BTW, I blame Tim Chae for suggesting that we get the flu shots and practically giving me the flu. Not feeling great today.
Unfortunately I missed the LGBT entrepreneurship event with Startout on Wednesday evening because I had to be in SF for meetings but I heard it was a great event. I did get a picture from the event:
Anyone who was there, feel free to add color!
Thursday was very eventful. It kicked off with a metrics session with Matt Berman. Good focus on what to measure, when to measure and when. Greg shared a lot of information about general solicitation over lunch. I think we all realize that we should not risk it…
We had a very good session with Amir Shevat from Google after lunch. There are some great technology and partnership opportunities for us with Google. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
The Punchd guys dropped in for a fireside chat in the evening. They were part of batch 1 of 500 Startups and were acquired by Google a couple years ago. They had great insights and pointers on bootstrapping a company and what not to do when you are in M&A discussions 🙂
The evening wrapped up at Saint Steven’s Green. Dave came out for a drink with us before his world tour. It was good to hang out with Jared from Populr and Ellis from Grata.
I was able to obtain a map of Dave McClure’s upcoming travels. If anyone wants to intercept him on the road. See the map below (click to enlarge & see the route):
Friday kicked off with my breakfast of champions (different angle this time :)):
We met with Felix from Microsoft on Friday. They have some interesting stuff going on but it looks like it will be much harder to partner with them. Too bad…
Week wrapped up with a mentor / founder mingling event and then it was time to head back to San Francisco for the weekend. I took a picture of our office from the parking lot and marked our windows (same window I took the picture above from):
We had a ton of other meetings starting to prepare for the Travel Innovation summit in November. OLSET (www.olset.com) will be one of 10 startups presenting at this event: http://phocuswrightconference.com/innovators
OK, back to work…
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