The Googleplex experience
Googleplex is huge, it seems that there's a whole town that exists only because of Google. When you get here, you really get the idea about the size of the corporation - it's a corporation by all of its meaning. Infinite buildings and office for various Google products, hundreds of people going back and forth.
What was said about Google is still true. You do want to work there. The place looks great and there's a feeling of extreme brain power everywhere you look. We got fed for free and even met Žiga, who is one of the few Slovenians working for Google. He's been doing it for a few years now, working on Google search, and he says he loves it. Who wouldn't?
Google's park and restaurant, located in the 1950 Mountain View building
Cafeteria and chill-out zone inside
The slide in the main lobby - sadly out of order. The screen displays Google search queries.
The Seedcamp experience
The mentoring sessions for Seedcamp teams took place in the afternoon in one of the buildings (Mountain View 1950 to be exact), where the companies currently in the Seedcamp program presented their solutions. I was honored to be one of the mentors, trying to help the projects with my experience in enterprise IT, business intelligence and Twitter integrations. Hopefully I was able to give the teams I was associated with some decent feedback. Here is the list of all 19 Seedcamp teams on the tour (including Oust.me from Slovenia), and these are the six I managed to get to know a bit more:
- Zingl, a dating service that uses the social, interest and location graphs to match people
- 24symbols, a solution for e-books based on a subscription model
- AppExtras, a plugin for mobile apps that allows publishers to promote other apps
- archivme, a service for managing invoices and other business documents in the cloud
- Bilbus, which works as a broker between businesses and lenders
- blossom, a project management tool for lean companies
Pretty much all of these 19 companies managed to create some very impressive business models and innovative new services.
Alex presenting Oust.me, a location-based conquering game
Mentoring sessions happened in various rooms
A bit of food and drinks after an exhausting day
What now?
So far, so good. The Seedcamp experience in the Googleplex was amazing, and I learned more in one day than I did before in months. I truly hope these teams will be able to get what they came looking for, and I hope I will too. I just need to find out what that is, because I'm not even sure anymore.
Check out the complete The Silicon Valley tour series.