Aging in Silicon Valley

Every year, I plan an excursion for my birthday and this year was no different. My company, Post.Bid.Ship., had recently purchased Salesforce.com (SFDC) to provide our sales team a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and it just so happened that SFDC had also scheduled their customer convention in San Francisco the same week as my birthday this year. When I shared with our awesome SFDC account manager the coincidence, she hooked me up with a heavily discounted ticket for my birthday and I was able to connect two very vital things: 1. learn more about a software application our company is deploying and 2. spend time in arguably the tech capital of the world: San Francisco.

During my time in San Francisco, I connected up with old friends, made new friends plus met up with some tech celebrities. Here is my new friend Derek Hall (left) with Park City Angels located in Park City, Utah and one of my technology role models Robert Scoble (right), the writer of the famous technology blog Scobleizer.

Derek Hall with Robert Scoble

At the conference, I also caught up with tech entrepreneur and awesome blogger Dharmesh Shah. Dharmesh is the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. I always enjoying reading his blog which can be read at Onstartups.com. Below is Dharmesh (left) and me (right) posing for an obviously outdated Apple iPhone 3 given the low resolution.

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And on my birthday, my co-founder at Post.Bid.Ship., Jarret Hamstreet, arranged a dinner reservation for my birthday at the famous McCormick & Kuleto’s Seafood Restaurant located in San Francisco’s historic Ghirardelli Square. He even went as far as to have the restaurant customize their menu for me! Now that is way cool!

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Also while in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to visit a fellow University of Arizona Alumnus, Rudy Adler, who had recently launched a company in San Francisco called 1000 Memories out of Y Combinator and had recently closed a very attractive round of venture capital with Greylock Partners (the funders behind Facebook, LinkedIn and Groupon). But don’t just take my word on Rudy’s success, click here to read what VentureBeat had to say about 1000 Memories earlier this year. Congrats Rudy!

Lastly during my visit to 1000 Memories and my other stops around San Francisco, I used a new Internet service called Uber. It is a web-based online exchange for cab service. Given that Post.Bid.Ship. is an online exchange designed to connect commercial shippers and carriers, how could I not partake in another online exchange like Uber!

Stay tuned here on my blog for my coming adventures over the next year. We never know where my adventures will take me but you can be sure I will take you my friends along for the ride!