Following our visit to Orange Silicon Valley on Monday, where our bloggers were able to meet with some of their American counterparts, we split up into several groups on Tuesday to meet as many companies as possible.
Along with Joanne Jacobs, Alexandre Delivet (who finally made it to California after plane troubles!) and Glenn Le Santo, we opted for a Chevrolet SUV to travel to downtown San Francisco to start our day of visits with a meeting with Causes, an online advocacy and fundraising platform. After a quick pit stop at Starbucks, we arrived at the bottom of a 24-story building, where we were told that we were expected on the top floor.
Outside the elevators, VP of Product Chris Chan gave us a warm welcome and took us on a tour of Causes’ offices. With a breathtaking panoramic view of San Francisco and the Bay Area, you have to wonder how they manage to be as productive as they are! Indeed, the company is in rapid growth, having gone from a team of 15 people a year ago to 40 today, and has moved from Berkley to SF in March of this year.
We then moved on to a suave meeting room where Joanne, Glenn and Alexandre listened to Chris give us a detailed account of the evolution of Causes, since it began in 2007 to where it is today. Chris spoke about Sean Parker’s involvement at the beginning, Causes’ close ties with Facebook and emphasized on the company’s vision: “Anyone has the power to change the world, and it’s our job to show them that they can”. For a complete report of our meeting, check out Joanne’s post.
With some time to spare before our next meeting we went wandering in San Francisco. After a spot of lunch, we sat in South Park to blog and then went over to the marina to have a look at the boats and the AT&T Park baseball ground.
At 3.30 we went over to Mekanism, an ad agency focusing on storytelling for emerging media. And as soon as we walked through the front door, we knew we were in for a treat. The workplace was like none we’d seen before, with vast office space and vintage furniture ranging from an Atari arcade booth to some old school music equipment. And the content presented to us by Mekanism was just as cool, notably two case studies of ad campaigns they had led for two major clients: Pepsi and 20th Century Fox. Find out more about our meeting with Mekanism here!
Our day ended with a meet & greet event at the heart of Stanford’s Venture Labs with entrepreneurs, VC’s and major players in the social gaming industry, followed by a panel surrounding the theme of the evening: gamification.
On Wednesday, our teams will once again shoot off to San Francisco and in the Valley for another series of meetings with various startups but also some of the big guns such as Adobe and Eventbrite. Stay tuned on the live Orange blog and on Twitter – #blogbus!
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