Greetings! Welcome to my blog, where I will be detailing my adventures with TextDigger and True Ventures as a participant of the TEC program for the next six weeks.
First, a little about me. I’m a rising junior at UCLA, where I study Economics and Cognitive Science. Ever since high school, I’ve been interested in everything related to business, especially entrepreneurship. When my brain wanders, which is often, I always end up brainstorming new product ideas. So far, I have focused on creating and further developing iStudyToGo, a software product that enables students to study on their iPods. Hopefully, iStudyToGo will be the first of many businesses I start. I am also a devout disciple of Michael Scott… Just kidding, but I love The Office.
On my first day at TextDigger, a groundbreaking start up that utilizes semantics to profile, search, and organize websites, I sat down with Bob Perreault, the VP of Business Development, to discuss the projects that I would be working on this summer. To my surprise, Bob was far more interested in what I wanted to get out of the internship than how I could be of service to TextDigger. Encouraged by this opportunity, I spent the first two days of the internship reading up on all of TextDigger’s products and practices as well as the larger semantic web industry. My research was informative and gave me lots of answers, but created even more questions – questions that Bob was never too busy to answer. Oftentimes we would go off on a tangent during these conversations, discussing entrepreneurship, venture capital, or foreign affairs in business. Its just great to converse with someone who has had such a fulfilling and successful career, who I not only have the opportunity to meet, but to engage with on a daily basis. Although I haven’t had a chance to work closely with the rest of the team at TextDigger yet, I’m lucky to share an office with a group of people whose passion and drive in realizing the semantic web is palpable in daily work. TextDigger is certainly a paper-pusher free workplace.
On Thursday, True Ventures took all of the interns to GigaOm’s Structure 2009. The event was a conference on cloud computing, an emerging industry focused on providing scalable hosting solutions for websites and internet applications. I can’t say cloud computing really applies to my life at the moment, but the conference held my attention all day. The most interesting part of the conference was the energy and vigor of all the attendants and panelists. As an undergraduate still quite uncertain of the future, it was refreshing and inspiring to engage with people who so blatantly loved going to work each day. Many of the people I met and heard speak have dedicated their lives to making our world a better place through the invention and installation of technology; and for the first time, I was able to really see what it meant to them.
The only thing that was possibly more awesome about Thursday was the extended period of time I got to spend with the other interns. I can honestly say that I find each of them to be incredibly interesting and thoughtful people. We all had so much to talk about without even trying.
My work in the latter half of the week at TextDigger consisted mainly of preparing our CRM software, SugarCRM. Last summer, I spent a fair amount of time tidying up my employer’s Salesforce database, so I was already fairly familiar with CRM software. SugarCRM is the leading open source solution for CRM software, and in my opinion, is a very useful and well designed tool. Watch out Salesforce! Instead of cleaning up the data in Sugar, I spent most of my time thinking about how to design the flow of information and business management, from lead acquisition to product fulfillment. Designing a specific implementation of CRM software is a great way to get hands-on experience in understanding the work flows and key data points of a business. As always, Bob was there to bounce ideas off of, and was able to share tremendous insight on some of my questions without simply giving me the answer.
Until next week,
Chris
