10/7/16: IdeaGeneration

1. 10/7/16
1. StatMech in the morning, review of thermo.
2. Go to this weird talk linked to on the CSE facebook, called IdeaGen. The speakers were really high-profile (C-suite exec of big consulting company Capgemini, product manager at Google X, head of a Microsoft Research lab, and founder of a New York media company) so I thought I’d check it out.
3. Before the talk starts, as I’m sipping on my free lemon-ginger-apple juice, Akshay comes in! We get to talking, about DubHacks, about Creating a Company, etc.
4. The first talk, Kim Smith of Capgemini, is really weird. Lots of namedropping, weird personal narrative stuff. It seems like the idea is to be inspirational.
5. I have to duck out to go to a Lavin MentorConnect lunch, which is really fun. This dude named Samir, who worked as a dev for 10 years and decided to start a company, ended up making the #1-ranked Slack extension (a polling system), got venture money, but still has no idea how to monetize his product. He’s trying to get big enterprise customers that use chat platforms instead of email.
6. Back to Ideagen, talk to the Google X guy with Akshay. Interesting, seems more like an incubator than like a Bell Labs kinda environment. But it is set up for generalists :)
7. Also talk to the head of the New York media company. She’s got a crazy story about founding a male revue (strip club-esque show) in Japan. Fascinating. We get to talking and she gives me some advice for marketing the SPS :D
8. Play basketball. Man, I am so glad I’m getting back into basketball. If I can get to the gym every day it will improve my mood loads. And I’m getting my old skills back fast!
9. Shower at the gym and book it to the Ave for office hours with Prof. Leong of Creating a Company. Get to use some of my new knowledge of China from the trip in a conversation about a potential company to place Chinese (\Indian\Korean) international students with schools and help them acclimate.
10. Return to 2104, make egg rolls with Xin and Josh. They are super delicious but soak up loads of oil. Then it’s off to Eastside with Diego and the crew. Get in some good dancing, though I’m a little off. Good conversation with a structural engineer gal who undergradded in physics. At the end, drag Alex out on the floor for the last dance, since she was using her meaningless door shift position (nobody shows up for the last song) as a cover for being tired, which is not normally a reason she would allow for not dancing :)
11. Return to U district and crash out.