A Fresh Start (up)

  After my worst day ever, a work colleague told me “you’re lucky, because it means that you will have great moments in the days to come, to balance good and bad in the universe”… and apparently he was right! I had one really great week end

On Saturday we went to visit Berkeley and UC Berkeley, and even if the university is not as nice as UCLA (OK, I’m so biased, but if you want to compare pictures are here!), I loved the famous hippie atmosphere. I have never seen so many billboards for so different causes: “Save Tibet”, “Stop Beijin’s Olympic torch and hold the torch of human rights”, “Vote for Obama”, “Save Darfour”…

On Saturday night, we went to the opening of Taste 2008 art exhibition: when you combine art and food (my 2 passions!) you get something really interesting, like paintings of delirious ice creams…and you can check it out here!

Finally, today we went to the San Francisco Chocolate Salon and even if it was a bit too crowded (who is able to resist the power of chocolate?!), I had the opportunity to taste some amazing chocolates, like the “banana froster”… yummy!!! Pictures are here, but you better not be hungry before checking them

The first steps of this expatriation are finally going fine, and I’m delighted by all the great things happening in the Valley; there are too many things to do every week end! The only expectable problem is just that… I miss my friends: I got most of you on the phone this week end and sometimes I feel that I would be more “useful” in France, that I wouldn’t have all the time the impression of missing some important moments of your lives… But I know that, should I have stayed, things would have been the same since you are all going to explore the world soon

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 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

As a part of my investigation on the differences between the real American culture and the one we see in teenage dramas, I thought that had to post a note about a tradition closely linked with college life: Greek Life. This post is inspired by an article of the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s newspaper.

According to this article, all the clichés we have about fraternities and sororities, such as hazing and alcohol abuse, are mainly exaggerated, at least at UCLA. About hazing, a member of a fraternity affirms that all Greek organizations at UCLA abide by the university’s policy against hazing, their organization’s national hazing policies, and the California State Law. He also adds that “not only do not we haze because it’s not allowed, but also we don’t find it conducive to the morals we stand for.” Concerning the fact that members are supposed to party all the time, this having a bad impact on their grades, he recalls that all the sororities and fraternities have a higher GPA average than the university’s all male and all female GPA average. He thinks that this is due - among other things - to the possibility to be tutored by other members.

More objectively, concerning the recruiting process, it differs for each organization. The 11 sororities have a common recruiting process starting on “Zero Week”: after having registered online, all the candidates attend a mandatory orientation session, then visit the 11 houses on the first two days of recruitment, and, as each day progresses, narrow down their choices. Each day, they are called back to a fewer number of houses. By the end of the process (called “bid night”), they end up having up to two choices. Concerning fraternities, the recruiting differ widely from one another but they all say that they are looking for “diversity and maturity”, whatever these words might mean.

At UCLA, 13% of the student body is currently involved in the Greek System, which is comprised of over 62 organizations.

For my course of entrepreneurship, I had to interview an entrepreneur to understand the major obstacles to overcome when creating a venture. Raphael Labbé, one of the co-founder of U.[Lik], has took the time to share with me the story of U.[Lik] from an entrepreneurial point of view. As many of you know, U.[Lik] allows users to share their tastes by creating their own online library where they can aggregate their ratings of cultural products (music, cinema, arts, people…).

You can find the story here on Tech IT Easy. Be careful, the article is really long, but how can you shorten an entrepreneurial story? Since entrepreneurship is all about mentoring, it has been really great for me to discover Raphael’s entrepreneurial adventure, or “rollercoaster”.

If you want to discover my tastes, visit my lounge on U.[Lik] here. Christmas is approaching, so please also check my wishlist ;-). And good luck to Raphael and Mathieu to build this “cultural Babel” (sorry but this expression rocks!).

 A lot of my courses are oriented towards entrepreneurship and technology management, so I will use some of them as a raw material for some articles here or on Tech It Easy.

I just published an article on Tech It Easy concerning a process to generate breakthrough innovations, especially in technological companies, by identifying “lead users” on a specific market. If you want to take a look it’s here.

As you can see, this blog is definitely taking a more personal approach; but I will keep on speaking a lot about tech in the weeks to come, probably essentially on Tech IT Easy.

Today was my first day of class, and I have dreamt my whole life to take courses in a prestigious American university mainly because 1) I wanted to feel like a teenage drama actress (I know, I’m too old for that!), and 2) I wanted to be able to compare French and US education, to try to understand why European university are still lagging behind US ones.

Of courses the main point is that a lot of money is needed to attract excellent professors, not only in terms of wages but also in terms of resources. Why would a professor prefer teaching at a campus miles away from Paris rather than teaching at sunny UCLA? Besides, the available resources in terms of research, networking and cross-functional teams cannot even be compared. So I can completely understand HEC’s challenge, and I think that HEC is finally doing pretty well compared to the level of competition.

 But the difference is still striking. Today, when I walked into this class about regulatory environment for small businesses, I had a really bad a priori about it, as I hate dealing with regulatory, accounting and administrative stuff (which is why I made and will probably make again a quite bad entrepreneur). But as soon as the professor started to speak, I didn’t miss a second of it, and it’s almost impossible to miss a second of it. In one hour, he used all the tools a professor can use to capture students’ attention. He spoke about his personal experience as an entrepreneur, he made jokes about the fate of the entrepreneur, about the necessity to support friends from Morgan Stanley showing their paycheck to everyone while the entrepreneur is struggling to make ends meet, he used multimedia stuff (videos), he used sports examples to illustrate legal concepts, he “cold called” students to push them to participate in the discussion…

I realized how great it was when I looked at my notes: the page was almost empty, because I was so concentrated in everything he said that I didn’t even need to take some notes. In a word, American people are really lucky to have an “easier” access to this kind of education.

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.

Yesterday, I attended the football game UCLA vs Washington at Rose Bowl. And the basic evidence that in the US belonging to a university is a much bigger deal than in France struck me even more. Can you imagine a stadium of 95 000 people dedicated to a university team? I think about my friends playing football at HEC: nobody cares, we barely even know the scores against other business schools. At UCLA, 95 000 people cheer these players every month; 5-year-old girls wearing one of the multiple UCLA sweatshirts, pompons and caps cry with joy when a player comes next to them; L.A. inhabitants with absolutely no relation with UCLA come to attend the event and choose their side and entire families come to support the team of the nephew’s university. I could barely imagine the face my parents would do if I asked them to attend an HEC football game knowing that I don’t even have any relationships with the players!

Ok, it is obviously a different culture, and a lot of reasons can explain that this can’t be applied in France, but what harm can it make to brand our schools a little bit better? What I mean is that I don’t expect people coming from all around France to attend an HEC football game, but I would find absolutely normal to be able to wear a fashionable HEC cap and jacket (and having the choice to choose the color, size and shape) when I go for a run, or an HEC towel when I take a bath… We must not forget that this pride of being part (or having been part) of a university generates millions of dollars to universities that directly benefit current students and alumni. Some might say that the problem is that we don’t have this pride in France; I would say that we do have it but we have nothing to prove it or express it.

And to finish, a little extract from the game, after the entrance of UCLA players (video n°1) and after a touchdown (video n°2):