Ah! Nothing like being back home from a nice long trip away. Boston was simply fantastic and it was nice to live life fantastically simple. While I must apologize for not telling as many people as I should about this trip, I found that keeping a low profile with certain things tends to keep life easier – a luxury in which I seldom indulge. A quick photo recap can be found here.
Hmm…where to begin with my week away from home…
Ah…how about behind a cut!
The primary purpose of the trip is to discover more about the American way of entrepreneurship and venture capital. This does not mean that we (as a class) did not fully take in the sights and sounds of Boston. It was a pretty whirlwind tour, but I’m certainly glad to be back.
Thursday June 14th
Left Waterloo really really early in the morning, only to be almost late for the flight [border issues, you know...]. Managed to make the flight and arrived safe and sound in Boston. I immediately rushed off to the Harvard Square area where [Mel and] I was going to visit Y Combinator, which is a pretty interesting early stage investor. Their way of funding was really interesting and I was able to meet a few cool entrepreneurs from iJigg and Traineo. Had dinner in the area and collapsed on my cot, thus ending the day.
Friday and Saturday June 15th and 16th
Attended the TiECon East Conference. I didn’t know that TiE stood for The Indus Entrepreneurs. This would explain the extraordinarily large contingent of East Indians I have ever seen. Still, the conference was actually pretty good; I learned a lot from it and met a few interesting people to boot. But alas, I was glad to see it come to an end Saturday night.
That evening, the class sent a large contingent to Club 33 in the Copley district. It was a pretty good evening outside of a random guy from Hong Kong being all friendly at the fact that I, too, am from the same region. That was just…weird…and random…but mostly weird.
Sunday June 17th
Day off. Went out to town. Joined a few people to shop…and shop…and shop. It was actually a lot of fun, despite my lack of purchases. Later that evening, I went down to the waterfront and got rained on.
Monday June 18th
MIT tour in the morning. So much geekiness there…truly wonderful. I even got a few t-shirts from the MIT Coop. Maybe I’ll take a few pictures of it before they become souvenirs.
Spent the afternoon at Harvard Square, and then went down to Quincy Market. Had dinner there, with lots of seafood…it was really good.
Tuesday June 19th
Spent the morning at an American law firm that specializes in Canadian-American business relations. That was informative. Afternoon was spent at start-ups learning about what they did. BzzzAgent was a really neat concept (and well implemented too) surrounding Word of Mouth marketing. It really seems like they have got it down pretty well. Visible Measures was a bit more of a less defined company, but it seems like they have a lot of smart people working for them. I’ll have to look into that company a bit more.
Ended the day at a BBQ hosted by General Catalyst, a venture capital firm based out of the Cambridge area. Neat people…very neat people. A bunch of people in the class went out to party…again. They’re crazy people.
Wednesday June 20th
Last day in Boston. Spent the morning at the General Catalyst offices. The CEO of Going.com had a pretty candid conversation with us and it was a lot of fun. He’s a very neat guy (in his mid-30s) working on a website primarily for the late 20 year olds. Man, he totally doesn’t act his age, which is great. We had a demo for MocoSpace afterwards, a social networking site for mobile devices. Interesting concept and we had a lot of fun with that.
Pretty much booked it out of the city after that to make our afternoon flight. After a lot of sitting in cars and such, we finally got home around 10pm. While it was a fantastic trip overall, it was also obvious that the class was tired and needed to be home.
Oh yea…I spent a lot of time taking pictures in Black and White for the trip. I think those came out so much better than the colour ones. Take a look at them here, and don’t forget to leave comments!
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