New post after lengthy hiatus…
So, I’ve neglected my blog for a while. It got lost somewhere in the whirlwind that was graduation at Stanford. Yes, I just graduated! It’s a really bittersweet time as most from the Stanford class of ‘09 will agree that the past four years have been the best of their lives.
So, while most of my fellow graduates are out traveling or taking vacation, I am working. While I would love to have a breka right now, I am currently participating in the Mayfield Fellows Program which started during the Spring quarter with a 4-unit class. The program is offered by Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and it’s a 9 month work/study program focusing on entrepreneurship. There is a summer session in which we are supposed to intern at a high-tech startup.
I am currently deep in week 3 at Topsy Labs, Inc., the company behind a new search engine which is currently powered by conversation streams on twitter. Topsy had been in R&D for 3 years and then launched the product a week before I came. I was particularly drawn to this company because of the team talent and also the fact that they are at a really exciting point for the company (having just launched). The startup has 15 members, and they are all very technical. While the rest of the company is pretty much focused on maintaining infrastructure and working on the backend, my job has been to understand how the user has been interacting with the site. This is a pretty large endeavor including both looking at analytics and usability testing. I’ll write a post about my findings probably next week when I have some baseline.
Other than work, I’m living in San Francisco again this summer ( I interned at Salesforce.com last summer and lived in the “tendernob,” one of the seedier neighborhoods in San Francisco. This year I am living with my friends, Gabe and Anuraag in SOMA which is really exciting. It seems like I know a good amount of people in the area, including my travel buddies from Oxford, Peter and Charlie. It was great to reconnect with them last week after not seeing them for over a year.
Anyway, I need to get back to work and scheduling some user tests. I’ll make sure to write more about my experiences at Topsy, and hopefully, I’ll populate napkintech with some more posts!