In the morning we drove to San Jose for a meeting at the Ebay Inc./Paypal office. We met our friend and Paypal Developer Robert Schwentker. He runs Paypal's Startup Blueprint Program. He invited us for the Commerce Innovation Showcase.

It starts in a living room! Michael welcomed us into this living room to introduce some new Ebay features: they have a new feed with personalized item experience and they added collections a few months, groups of items put together by users. They add a social aspect to the Ebay experience. They now have 500 million items online and they have 130 million active users (users who made a purchase in the last 10 months). Another new thing is Available Now, a one hour delivery service. It is already live in the Bay Area, New York, Dallas and Chicago. They recently acquired Shuttle, a delivery service that uses the same system as the Uber taxi service and they are starting to use them for this feature. The great thing about this feature is that they actually go to the store and buy the product. They don't compete with local sellers, they work with them. Unlike Amazon, who is putting the local vendors out of business. 

The next part of the show was the amazing shops they set up to demonstrate all the different options Paypal offers. There was a hamburger restaurant, a music shop, grocery shop, vegetable store, ...

With Paypal, you can or will be able to: order your food in advance, pay from your phone, add something to your order,.... As a vendor, you can see who enters your shop, what they like and don't like, when their last visit was. The options are endless!

After the meeting, Robert arranged some lunch for us and then we had a tour of the Paypal offices. There's a gym, basketball court, several restaurants, free soft drinks, little turtles swimming around,... It looks like a great place to work! After this we said good bye to Robert and drove to our next meeting.

 

We went to Palo Alto to meet Madeline Duva, mentor of Happy Farm and of many many other startups all over Europe and the US! She gave some advice about moving to the US to develop your company. She said if your customers are in the US and your investors are here, you should move here. At Sequoia, they even put their Startups at their office, to be able to help them as much as possible.

She also talked about being a CEO. As a CEO, you have to be willing to do a bit of everything. You can't afford to concentrate on one thing too much, even if it is what you prefer. You have to be willing to do some things you don't like.

She also gave some advice to write summaries, for your team and also for other people : mentors, potential investors and other people who asked you to keep them up to date. The summary helps you to keep in touch with those people; helps you to keep track of what you are doing and motivates your team.

After the meeting with Madeline, we rushed back to the city for a meeting with John Gower, Happy Farm mentor and CEO of Dialect Inc. They work out of an amazing office, We Work. We first got a tour of the office and talked to Tim, the community manager. They have 500 people at the office and about 100 companies. It is not only a workspace, but also. Work community. They have lounges, kitchens and meeting spaces on each floor. They also plan events for their members. It is a beautifully designed, inspiring workplace!

 

Then John talked a bit about his company. They specialize in apps and digital magazines for games, music,... They are not like a normal startup as they had paying clients from the first day, but in a lot of other ways, they are like a startup, working hard to build a great company.

It was great to see John again! He always supports our teams and visits our events when we are in San Francisco.

In the evening, a few of the teams went to a network event organized by PeopleConnect.

A great day: amazing visit to Paypal, interesting talk with Madeline and inspiring meeting with John!