1415T1g1 Silicon Valley/Participant Information/Reflection/8 Dec
Our visit to Paypal was a particularly interesting and engaging experience, we visited their showroom on their current and future developments and were pretty blown away by how our two showroom host, Eric & Michael, presented all the new up and coming features that Paypal are working on providing. The most impressive feature which showed us were the integration of their Paypal application with the POS systems in which they are trying to provide a more hands-free and friction-less kind of customer experience to the future customers (through the use of a bluetooth beacon). The entire experience at Paypal i believe for most of us can be summarized by 3 letters IDP (Interactive Design & Prototyping) which most of us took this semester. Paypal gave us a industry level showcase of many concepts that we learnt in class such as personas, scenarios, context & presentation of our work.
Singtel Innov8 was completely different experience from Paypal, We had two great hosts, Jeff & Daryl, who shared with us what Singtel Innov8 is about and how they function as a venture capital firm. Our team were able to have a very meaningful Q&A session with our host, conversing about a wide spectrum of topics ranging from how venture capitals work to what are the new technologies that they are looking into in the future.
Twilio i believe was the highlight of the day, we were hosted by Peter (a fellow Singaporean working here) and he gave us a pretty thorough run through of the entire company and its services which left us pretty much only personal questions such as what the company culture was like etc to ask. I was particularly impressed by the entire culture and the environment of the company, how it functions, how they encourage their employees to explore and provide the more self-driven environment to their employees. The company seem to give a very welcoming and warm working environment where everyone knows everyone and are mostly self-driven but yet towards the company's main objective. The most memorable thing at the company i believe was the pizza box framed up at the entrance, with the initial brainstormed ideas of what Twilio was going to be scribbled on top of them by the founding fathers of the company. Back in my mind i could picture a few guys sitting by a box of pizza in one of their garages and brainstorming of an idea to start their company with, it really showed me how any ideas that we can think of at any time might be small or unrealistic at that time but given some time and effort it could be made into a brilliant idea such as Twilio