A Fresh Start (up)

I had a great week, this kind of week that makes you feel more and more at the right place. So, in bulk:

-  The season 2 of Greek started on ABC Family, and this was really the highlight of my week… Ok, I’m kidding (not so much actually).

-  I also passed the written test of the driving exam, so now I need to pass the behind-the-wheel test and I’ll be done with Vietnamese driving instructors hitting me when I do something wrong and braking violently while screaming in an incomprehensible language

-  I also tried driving a go-cart for the first time in my life, as part of a corporate team building event, and it was very fun, even if of course I was the last one of the race, which most of you would have totally expected from me . Pictures are here.

-  I had brunch in SF on Saturday at Perry’s, a very American place, with Guillaume, a very nice French expat, who gave me great advice on how to settle down efficiently here. It was great to finally have an occasion to meet people outside work colleagues, thanks Guillaume!

-  Following Guillaume’s advice, I visited San Juan Bautista today, a small city lost in the mountains, where Vertigo from Hitchcock has been shot. As you can see in the picture, you can find there, apart from a beautiful Mission to visit, buildings reminding westerns, except that Harley Davidson have replaced horses! All the pictures here.

-  I bought a BBQ, so now I start feeling really American

Is there anybody here? When I take a look at my stats, I guess that there is nobody left

OK, I haven’t updated this blog for months, simply because the past 2 months were simply a transition period when I had nothing, absolutely nothing, interesting to say. I spent these 2 months with my family in the South of France, writing my thesis (almost done!) and being the more stressed girl on the planet because both my boyfriend and I got issues about our visas, and I was thinking that we were never going back to the US as we initially planned. Finally, we both received our beloved visas this week, and we are leaving on Friday

So I have decided (finally, after many hesitations!) to keep this blog as a more personal one, where I will speak about my expatriation and my experience in the US, and to keep the more professional stuff on Tech It Easy, that I haven’t updated in a while either.

So, of course, a lot more to come here about my first days in San Jose by the end of the week (if strikes in France don’t get worse and I manage to leave!)…

This is it: I’m leaving L.A. on Sunday! It is of course a good occasion to step back and think about the results of this exchange and what has surprised me in general.

Having already been a B-school student, I thought that this Exchange would be valuable mostly for the international experience rather than for the content itself. But, apart from the obvious things (discovering life in a US university, having the occasion of meeting people with very different backgrounds due to the “aggregator” role of universities…) I have really enjoyed spending a term in an MBA program because:

• The courses are much more practical than in Masters program: for example, when dealing with innovation, professors don’t say basic things like “you have to hire creative people” but on the contrary explain all the stages of an innovation program and the different tools to foster innovation based on real companies’ experience because their audience has already dealt with practical problems and want practical solutions.
• The courses are much more interactive: all the students have on average 5 years of professional experience, so it’s usual that they have already been confronted to some situations that we talk about in class and can bring their experience to the discussion.
• People are not here only to enjoy parties and get drunk like in B-school: they have paid a lot to be there and want to make the most of it. Therefore they are really open to networking, and are most of the time delighted when you ask them questions. I have had particularly interesting discussions with people having worked previously in the Internet sector (Yahoo!, AOL, Google…) in senior positions, which is a unique opportunity to understand the career development in this sector. I was afraid that this difference in terms of professional experience would prevent me from being really integrated, but it wasn’t the case: American people really admire Europeans having learned English and ready to bring their knowledge to a US university, so they welcome any insight. I must anyway acknowledge that my year of internship has been really useful in this context, at least to better understand some particular management problems that can’t be considered from an empirical point of view (like resistance to changes, that I have experimented during my internships).
• I have gained a lot of knowledge about the corporate environment in general thanks to a lot (and I mean A LOT) of case studies. Having to read 2 entrepreneurs’ stories every week plus having a guest speaker every 2 weeks gives a better understanding of entrepreneurship than some PowerPoint slides saying “you have to be able to take risks”. Same thing in my course “Technology Management”: I didn’t know anything about the hardware or biotech industry, and now I understand what are the big challenges, and how to compare the different tech industries. Even in the Internet one, I got a more managerial and broader view to analyze the sector. MBA students have most of the time (like in most jobs) been focused on details and come there to get the whole picture on what they’ve done and where they’re going.
• This exchange has also had an unexpected effect. I have been having fun during 3 months  with people that I could have met during recruiting processes, in suit and ties, asking me “what do you think that the company should do if competitor X enters the market with a price lower by 28%? how will the operating margin be affected?”… It has allowed me to clearly acknowledge that after 5 years of professional experience, these people know a lot more than I do, but that it doesn’t mean that I don’t have a chance to impress them by showing some maturity and an organized reasoning, because I have shown during group meetings that I was up to the task.

And I will finish this post with  a quote that I will remember forever mentioned by my Entrepreneurship professor:

“Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

So simply let your music play!

I had some thoughts a few weeks ago about what this blog was going to become. If you see this post, you will think that these thoughts weren’t worth it! But anyway, my friends found this video of me (made in Vegas, of course) quite funny, so I share it with you in a “stupid interlude”!

I feel really ashamed that I haven’t updated this blog for weeks, and I apologize sincerely to my (few) readers who doesn’t find here any updates. I have the impression that the more exciting my life is, the less lively this blog is. The thing is that I would have plenty of things to say, but I don’t find the time, or don’t try hard enough.

The courses at UCLA are very demanding but still really interesting, and I am starting to work on my final projects.  In Technology management I am analyzing the VoIP market, in Global Operations Strategy I will study the digitization of entertainment industries and in Corporate Entrepreneurship my project is to compare Google and eBay in terms of innovation strategy. So you can guess that I have a lot of material to cover, especially since I also have to make progress on my thesis about “Internet and the democratization of contemporary art”. But OK, I acknowledge that I am obviously looking for excuses, because I manage to find some time to travel (San Diego was great!) so I should find some time to blog!

I am also really busy preparing my relocation, and I still hesitate in going back to Silicon Valley for one week end to find a place to live before coming back to France for Christmas. Otherwise I would have to find a temporary housing in January, and this is a nightmare

This is it, I promise I’ll try to share the great lessons of my final projects with you soon

Update: I forgot the most important: I bought an iPod Touch! After long hesitations between the iPhone and the iPod Touch, I realized that it is before all having a cool wifi device that interested me the most, and the iPod Touch provided it without being obliged to accept the deal with AT&T and without paying $500 deposit! And of course now I can’t stop playing with it

It’s always difficult to speak about my expatriation, to communicate what surprises me, what I like and dislike about it on an ongoing basis on this blog, because it would generate really short articles about some silly things. Twitter would be the ideal way to do that but as most of my friends are not geeks, I know that I don’t reach the people I want with this medium. So I decided to make regular updates gathering all the news and practical details of my expatriation, my opinions and feelings about it. It is particularly important for me since I use expats’ blogs a lot, to discover great things to do, to understand some cultural aspects, or simply to know how to get my Internet access repaired in this country! So, in bulk:

• I love studying in the US, because I realized I really lacked some concrete experience about the fields I am studying. I get to listen to business angels, VCs, entrepreneurs, corporate entrepreneurs, innovation directors… and I simply love it, because I put a face on these functions and I mitigate my thoughts and stereotypes.
• L.A. has plenty of advantages (amazing weather, both great cultural and night life, great entertainment, lovely areas…) but a big drawback: it’s huge. As my budget didn’t allow me to rent a car for 3 months, I am obliged to plan days in advance what I want to do, because you can’t simply wake up one morning and go to downtown, because you have to remember that it is at least 1hr30min bus drive to go there. I have no impression of “knowing” L.A. as I can’t do multiple things in the same day, so I can’t manage to “connect” the different places I go to. Fortunately my neighborhood is one of the nicest (Westwood, between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills ;-))
• Today is Halloween, and it’s a big deal here, but it has been celebrated everywhere for a week now (you can see my costume of devil here)… Originally I thought that Halloween was supposed to be scary, but it is in fact the equivalent of Mardi Gras… And most women (at least in L.A.) preferred the sexy costume than the scary one!
• I kept the best part for the end: I just accepted an offer to work as a Business Analyst for the Marketplaces Strategy team of eBay in San Jose, California (headquarters), and I will start working there in January. Obviously I’m delighted, especially since I enjoyed my internship at eBay France, but also because it’s a great opportunity to discover the challenging environment of Silicon Valley, and to work with the best people of the sector, all sharing the same amazing corporate culture. I would have so many great things to say about eBay (the core values, the amazing portfolio, the great challenges to face, the vision, the campus…ok I stop now) but I have decided that it will be the only time I will speak about it. There are a lot of legal aspects involved when blogging about the company you’re working for, and the limit between what you can say or not is often really vague. I will of course share my knowledge of the Internet sector and what I will learn by interacting with bloggers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, but I won’t say a word anymore about eBay itself.
• My boyfriend also has to find some work in Silicon Valley, so if you know a company needing a top notch software engineer and having no problem in sponsoring visas, please let me know, that’d be great!
• I will move to Silicon Valley in January, and have to find a place to live: I’m hesitating between living in San Jose to be close to eBay or finding a nicer area… If you have any advice then do no not hesitate! I think I will try to rent a place for one month to give me time to find my “ideal apartment”.

That’s it, I will keep you posted about the many practical things I will have to overcome to settle down

I don’t want to talk here about religion, I just want to talk about faith. From what I saw this week end in San Francisco (and I really don’t know if I can generalize, as SF is such a special place!), American people have a really demonstrative way of showing their faith. And surprisingly, I loved it.

On Sunday morning I went to Glide Memorial Church, as advised by my travel guide (I’m still such a tourist!), to attend a gospel celebration. But what I found there was a communion of really happy people, only linked to each others by their “faith”, even if they really don’t seem to have the same definition of that. After some amazing gospel songs, a lady in a beautiful and sexy suit (no idea who she was) started to speak next to the reverend about the values of Glide Memorial Church: absolutely everyone is accepted (religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity), as God loves everyone unconditionally. In France, this may sound as a marketing speech, but in SF, when I looked at the crowd gathered there, I promise that it was a concrete proof of what she said: homeless people, traditional American families, people from all nationalities and all ages…. Then a gay man started to speak about the future workshops of the church: “how to be happy as a gay or a lesbian” and spoke about the “management of the difference” in today’s world. It was really good to see that there is such an acceptance, even if I’m sure that I won’t find the same kind of church in the Midwest… So, even if at the beginning I thought that this kind of faith is a bit weird as, in my education, basically if you are Muslim you don’t pray the same God as if you are Christian, I rapidly realized that if faith is aimed at making people happy (even if I don’t agree with that definition), then Glide Memorial Church has probably understood the key message. I sang hand in hand with diverse people, I was hugged many times by people I didn’t know anything about, and at the end I felt like these people had found some kind of comfort in this place, and it made me happy to.

By the way, for all my friends who read that and are getting worried because I’m usually so cynical, don’t worry, Glide Memorial Church is not a cult, or at least I suppose it isn’t since it is mentioned in my travel guide!

I managed to record an extract from one of the gospel song ( I know that I’m an incorrigible gospel fan…), so just enjoy this really short podcast!

This is kind of the paradise for a girl like me. All the logos of the big Internet companies are appearing on all sides of the road… Silicon Valley is definitely my Disneyland

By the way, being there is a great gift for my birthday (and thanks to all of my readers who wished me a happy birthday ;-))… But unfortunately you are now punished by being obliged to watch another one of my awful podcasts… This time, it’s about the HP garage in Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silicon Valley: I think that you can see on the video that I am delighted to be there, even if it’s just the entry of a garage which can’t even be visited

As you may have noticed, this blog has been going in every directions these past weeks. I created it a few months ago and was willing to wait until my expatriation to launch it, but I couldn’t resist and I started this blog by talking a lot about Internet stuff, as it is the sector I love, and because I was really focused on that those past few months.

But the Internet is not the only thing I would like to talk about; in fact I realize that I would like to be able to write about everything I like, everything that surprises me, everything that scares me. In a word, I would like to talk about my life, because it’s often what blogs written by a unique author are, and life is diverse, fortunately.

I have spent one week and a half in the US now and I can’t manage to catch up with Internet news, so at this moment I can’t say anything great about Internet stuff but I would love to talk about American educational system, about the difficulties of expatriation, about the fact of being immersed in a group of international people… And I will probably go back to tech subjects in a while because I’ve taken courses in Technology Management at UCLA which are really promising. And I’m still working on my thesis about the impact of the Internet on the art market so I will also bring cool stuff about it.  And I know that it is hard to find a consistency between Internet, entrepreneurship, digital art, expatriation and education topics, but the common thing they share is that they are all part of my life…

But I also know that I can’t ask my readers to be interested in everything I like, so I really don’t know what to do

In a word it would be great if you can give some feedback on the subject. Do you think that blogs have to be specialized so that readers know what to expect? Or that if you like a blog it’s because you like the author (:-)) and would be interested in knowing more about him/her on multiple topics?

PLEASE, I really need your comments to figure that out, and it can also bring an interesting discussion about what blogging really is.

I really didn’t plan on writing this but apparently, things like this happen in L.A.! About one hour ago, we were forced by policemen to evacuate our apartment because… apparently there is a bomb in our street! You really can’t imagine the impression it is to have a policemen knocking at your door in the middle of the night and pushing you away from your apartment, then running out of a perimeter in pyjamas, then trying to find a taxi, then trying to find an hotel to crash while one of the most populated area in L.A. is being evacuated… So we were obliged to spend 200 bucks to get a room somewhere, but at least now we’re at the Marriott! We were lucky because we were closest to the “supposed” bomb so we were the first building of a whole boulevard to be evacuated, so we found an hotel quite rapidly… I really can’t complain, people who were in the towers during 9/11 would have loved to be moved on time…

More to come in a few hours, I really hope that this is a false alarm and that I’ll be back to my apartment tomorrow morning…

Update: Of course it was a false alarm, and I can go back to my apartment. I could even have done that 2 hours after evacuating apparently, but they probably prefer to be cautious… All the story here. At least the night at the Marriott was really nice

Update n°2: After going back to our apartment, we decided to go outside to shop and… same scenario, with cops everywhere, streets shut down…you wont believe it but it was another bomb alarm, two on the same day!! All the (second) story here. I will definitely need to get used to that… They evacuated a whole building, and now the traffic is back to normal.