REGISTRATIONS ARE CLOSED. NO MORE EMAIL PLS.

Fellas,

I should have 2 months available in Nov.-Dec. 07 – mainly to clear all academic obligations I’ll still have to abide by (reports, thesis, etc.). But I thought I could be efficient for once and find some time to enjoy my last bits of student life.

That’s why I decided a couple weeks ago to organize a study trip to Silicon Valley. It will be a week-long study trip focusing on the business of innovation & technology (entrepreneurship, venture capital, software, computer networks & hardware, consumer electronics & Internet, telecommunications) and actually take place between Sunday, 25th November 2007 and Sunday, 2nd December 2007. No kidding, it’s serious business so save the dates!

The study trip will be put up on behalf of the Master of Information Technology at Ecole Centrale Paris (ECP). But it’s opened to everyone although I have intentionally decided to restrict the number of attendants to 20, or so, for the group 1) to remain manageable; 2) to be big enough to open us the doors of Silicon Valley’s bulge bracket companies (yes, the big ones); 3) to be small enough to enable us to visit start up companies on US Road 101 or Network Circle and venture capitalists directly at their office on Sand Hill Rd.

- Why Silicon Valley? Because it’s Mecca for all geeks, entrepreneurs and technologists. The quality of the organizations we’ll visit and the people we’ll meet there is just unmatchable, and I’m convinced we’ll come back with plenty of new ideas and drive to pour in our respective organizations. Makes sense, doesn’t it? About our stay: I’d rather pick up a hotel in the city center of San Francisco so that we can hang around in the city at night (should cost less than paying cabs to go out and come back). So it’s a trip to San Francisco & Silicon Valley!

- What should we be doing there? Visit universities, start ups, incubators, ventures capitalists, corporations, research centers + probably get a snapshot of how the the wine tastes in Napa Valley + hopefully watch the 49ers play. I’ll keep you updated about all scheduled visits until the agenda is frozen. Oops, I was almost forgetting: we should also have some fun! I know it may sound a bit weird to register for a study trip you have no idea what and who you’ll be visiting. But trust me, every second of the trip will be worth it.

- How much? Should all pile up to 1500 euros maxi. (most probably less) including plane fare, accommodation, 2 meals a day (or maybe around 1200 euros & each one pays for its own meals, we’ll see), and local transportation (bus rental for 1 week for the group). I’ll ask you to pay around 2/3 (two thirds) of it by check or bank wire pretty soon to book for plane tickets and hotels (I’ll book everything before April 22nd 2007 as I want to get rid of this before starting to work full-time). All participants will be informed of all details of the cost breakdown of the study trip. Important notice: as many students are taking part of the trip, one should not be surprised by the low luxury standards we will go for in terms of accomodation and food (we’re heading for a low cost hotel & low cost restaurants). Or there’s no way we would fit in a 1500 euros budget.

- How do I join? Registrations are closed. No more email pls.

- How do I help? Help most welcome, but only if not meant to be polite but to actually help; in this case, just let me know that you can give me a hand organizing the study trip (and preferably what you’d like to do). Even if you’re not coming, I’d be glad to gather valuable contacts in Silicon Valley or useful practical advice.

- FAQ? Use the comment section of this very post. I noticed everybody asks the same questions so let’s pool the answers on this post. In case of a private question, I’ll be glad to answer by e-mail. For instance, I’ve answered this question thrice: in case you’re not departing from Paris and coming back to Paris, you’ll have to arrange your plane tickets yourself (and obviously, you won’t pay for the Paris – San Francisco return ticket).

All this being said, I’m looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco & Silicon Valley!

- Who’s coming already? (nationality, University if still student (if applicable), job & company, nota bene (if applicable))

Jeremy Fain (French, HEC Paris & ECP student, Emerging business team junior business developer @ Microsoft France)

Olivier Ezratty (French, independent innovation strategy consultant in Paris & visiting professor @ ECP)

David Merchin (French, technology innovation consultant in Grenoble)

Youssef el Alaoui (Moroccan, ECP student, information system architecture consultant @ IT service company Weave in Paris)

Julien Genestoux (French, founder and manager @ JobEtudiant & LBO Analyst @ BNP Paribas San Francisco, just joining – no plane & no accommodation to book)

Alexandre Otparlic (French, Director of operations @ IT service corporation Alligra in Paris & visiting professor @ ECP)

Philippe Vaillergues (French, CEO @ IT service company Henix in Paris)

Frédéric Boyadjian (French, entrepreneur, departing from Lyon so no need to arrange for plane tickets)

Fabrice Papst (French, independent innovation consultant, founder of Idou)

Olivier Marx (French, founder of web agency Altics)

Mikaël Benfredj (French, web entrepreneur)

Raphaël Labbé (French, founder and business manager of Internet start up company U.[Lik])

Emmanuel Douaud (French, cofounder of social networking start up SeeMy.fr)

Guillaume Limare (French, ESSEC student, founder of inoveum.com)

Bertrand Scache (French, founder of IT budget consultancy Episystem)

Sylvain Zimmer (French, student @ ENSIMAG, founder of Internet start up company Jamendo)

Yonathan Arfi (French, founder of Arcoprod & Doneo.org)

Nabil Bouchlouh (French, ERP consultant @ Scandent Group, on a mission @ IBM)

Henry Nidecker (Swiss, student @ ??, product manager @ Nidecker Snowboard)

Yann Le Gouic (French, student @ Euromed Marseille, marketer @ stuviVZ)

Jacques Froissant (French, founder @ Altaide and cofounder @ Moovement)

Alain Le Corvec (French, former President @ Philips France)

Jacques Cinqualbre (French, cofounder @ HOPI)

Saïd Sebti (Moroccan, venture capital analyst @ Ventech)

Special thanks for their help planning visits, even though they can’t make it:

Benoît Peyronnet (French, France Telecom Group VoIP Abroad program director)

Dana Parries (American, ECP student, IT specialist @ JP Morgan)

Ghislain Morard (French ECP student, entrepreneur)

Michael Salomon (French, Ph.D. student @ Stanford University)

Special thanks to all bloggers who help marketing the event:

Lucien Huang, Ilan Abehassera, Olivier Ezratty, Marc Duchesne, Julien Codorniou, Ouriel Ohayon & Loïc Le Meur, Thomas Faivre-Duboz, Michel de Guilhermier, Cédric Giorgi, Olivier Marx

This morning, I went for tea (him) / coffee (me) with a really amazing guy at a Starbucks somewhere in West Yorkshire, Northern England (yes, that’s where I’m spending my holidays, yeeeeehaaaaa). He told me he wanted to get neither a picture nor a quote (and actually forbid me to disclose his identity unless I wanted to go into serious trouble ), so let’s call him Mr X (we agreed on that).

Mr X spent most of his career in the software industry. Mostly in the United Kingdom (Cambridge & Oxford mainly), despite a brief stay in Silicon Valley about 2 decades ago.

A former math teacher for a little while a long time ago in a galaxy so far away, Mr X has long been a software developer (Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, LISP and finally C++ & Java) until the early 2000s, and then became a sales rep for a major public global enterprise software company until last year. Mr X now works in sales in his son’s company (nothing to do with technology anymore) – still in B-to-B sales.

Leaving aside many interesting things we talked about, I absolutely wanted to share 2 things with you, drawn from Mr X’s experience.

1) Being a sales rep in a public software firm

Mr X told me about how a sales experience in a public company could be such a nightmare under poor management.

Public companies release revenue targets on a quarter-to-quarter basis. And should the company miss its revenue target scope by a margin point, the markets would hit very hard on the stock (software being a growth market, software stocks are highly correlated to sales rather than, say, EBITDA – although I believe this stance is less and less true under current market conditions). So, when the management feels it might miss the sales target and hence risk a stock backlash, all sales representatives of all business units worldwide are told they’re bound to close all deals from negotiations already initiated, no matter the price, no matter the profit margin.

It all results in having sales reps rushing to agree on deals on which the software company, the company they actually work for, actually loses money (but increases revenues, true, and matches short term market expectations, true, and increases sales rep bonuses, true as these were indexed to gross revenues and not revenues targets). Moreover, quarter in quarter out, the same trend repeated as the sales reps had often lost their best deals at the end of the precedent quarter due to management unreasonable overestimated sales targets.

This irrational rationale actually made Mr X quit his high-wage job as a regional enterprise software sales rep for a global software leader after 5 years in business. Mr X said he felt that, through abiding by the management sayings, he harmed the company more than actually having clients respect it more and more – and went to work with his son in a totally different industry (100% brick-and-mortar, if you see what I mean).

I think it’s always interesting to see how an apparently very abstract / strategic decision, namely a financial communication figure, can have such a deep impact on the mindset of the troops on the ground. I guess in this global company, the management had no clue what was actually going on outside their fancy headquarters.

2) Old school software developers perform better than rookies

Mr X climbed the software development ladder up to being in charge of recruiting hackers and managing software development projects.

Until recently, Mr X organized hacking competitions within his teams (last competition occurred in 2001, a couple days before he quit his software development career). Success criteria were a combination of velocity (how long will it take you to complete the job), efficiency (how much ROM and hard drive will your software need to run), effectiveness (does it actually do what we initially wanted it to do?), readability (they’d rank the clarity of the code) and performance (does it run fast).

In almost 3 decades hacking code, Mr X told me no rookie ever won any of the software development competitions. Since most his software developers were working together, all of them did pretty much a similar (good) job at hacking code fast (velocity), making it work under initial specifications (effectiveness), write clean and comprehensive code (readability), and have it run under respectable delays (performance). But only “old school” software developers could write efficient code. Old school software developers are people who have experienced times when a huge hard drive could store, say, 4 kbytes of data back in the late 70s. Consequently, since they really outperformed the rest of the team on the efficiency criterion, “old school developers” almost won all editions of the hacking competition.

I guess the 2-digit growth on the consumer electronics and mobile phones markets are sort of highlighting again the need to write efficient code today.