Sharing my entrepreneurial experiences with Stanford students

Busy day for me today. I flew in to San Jose for the day to give a class on Entrepreneurship to Electrical Engineering students at Stanford.

The day really started last night. Anne-Laure, Arnaud and I worked till about 1AM on the Wambo tutorial, a new Wambo feature UCSD students have asked for (more on that later). On my side, I prepared a few slides for my Stanford presentation. Before going to bed, I called the doorbell for a wake up call, “Front desk, what can I do for you”. “Hi, I’d like to get a wake up call for 6AM”. “You’re all set” (hang). The phone did ring in the morning, around 5:50AM. On a typical day, I would have extended my night 10 more minutes since they were early. But I didn’t want to take any chances - and jumped in the shower.

The car ride to the San Diego airport reminded me of my own college days. Loud music and light chat with your buddy to stay awake. We finally got to the airport. Arnaud dropped me off and heads back to the hotel - I checked-in, went through security, got a cup of Joe and boarded on my plane to San Jose. Luckily for me, the middle seat was empty on the plane - unluckily, Joe Schmock the early morning humorist couldn’t stop cracking up loud jokes in the back of the plane.

The plane wheels finally hit the ground in San Jose. Pretty cold, but no worse than San Diego. I go to the rental car counter, jump into my white Alero and soon enough I’m on 280 North. Arrhhhhh, highway 280 - the San Francisco-San Jose road that drives across some of the most scenic places in the Bay area… I get off Page Mill, drive around the hills, see my horses again on the right side, then make a left on El Camino. I decided to make a quick detour by Sierra, to see Escondido village - Hoskins 6D - where I lived for 2 years. Finally get to Tresidder Union, park my car - then get another cup of coffee, at Peet’s inside the cafeteria.

The campus is nearly indentical to what is was late 90’s. The CoHo (coffee house) was closed but still there, and the buildings of course had not change a bit. Even faces looked familiar for some reason. Finding the Terman Auditorium was easy. This is where as a student, I met Milton Chang after a conference. Milton is a Silicon Valley angel investor who help me get things started with Fireclick, my first company. In some ways going back to Terman was like rewinding back to 1998 - this time however I was the speaker.

I had a lot of fun giving my presentation. Students were genuinely interested in Wambo, and asked me lots of questions on the technology - which was great because we never publicly discuss the hugely complex file transfer mechanics that make media sharing so fast and efficient in Wambo. But I must confess I had even more fun answering questions on my entrepreneurial experiences. These were great questions on how to form a startup, how to choose your co-founders, how to raise capital, etc. I answered all these questions straight from the gutt. I felt truly connected to the students and was pleased to get so much interest.

After the conference, I quickly stopped by Wambo in Sunnyvale to say hi to the team, then went home to wash my clothes and take a short nap. Then, back to the airport for my flight back to San Diego. Got there at 11PM, went for some drinks with the team, and back to bed around 1AM. What a day!

-Xavier