Wednesday in Silicon Valley brought the opportunity to shadow one of six different companies all over the Valley. We loaded up the fleet of minivans after another Hotel Aria breakfast and headed to venture capital, biotech, and information technology companies as close as Mountain View (right down the street!) and far away as Pleasanton.
A group of six life science-focused ESTEEMers had the privilege of shadowing Zeltiq, a well-established cosmetic fat reduction technology company. Jon Freise writes of the experience at Zeltiq:
"Several of the students with life science backgrounds were able to attend Zeltiq headquarters in Pleasanton. ZELTIQ was founded in 2005, IPOed in 2011, and is lead by Notre Dame alumnus and CEO Mark Foley. Their main product is a medical device called CoolSculpting. This cosmetic based device uses a vacuum suction freezing mechanism to selectively spot reduce fat tissue. We were able to talk to various employees involved in HR, sales, counsel, R&D, and user training to get a full picture of the company. It was especially interesting to hear about how Zeltiq licenses intellectual property from research institutions since several of our own thesis projects hope to implement this same model. We begged and pleaded to receive treatment on the spot, and one of us even made it on to the operating chair, but will have to wait for another day. Nevertheless, we all went home with a firsthand experience of a fast growing medical device company grounded in entrepreneurial and innovative roots."
A second student group headed to Marketo, a marketing automation software company, to observe startup culture and success in action. Paul Mahony writes:
4 students; Paul Mahony, Matt Caponigro, Kate Bussey and Todd Hoogland visited Marketo in San Mateo to shadow Notre Dame alum and VP of sales Amy Guarino. What was incredible about this experience is that Amy had not prepared anything special per se, instead the 4 students had total access to her day-to-day life in Marketo, this varied from meetings with lawyers to product managers. After spending some hours with Amy we were handed over to Eduardo, another Notre Dame grad, who let us sit in on a live sales call. It was fascinating to see the inner workings of sales force and how Marketo are integrated into their system, offering exactly what the customers needs.
4 other companies including Synack, Workday, Woodside Capital, Forward Accelerator, and Kyndi provided kind hospitality, wisdom, and mentorship to our ESTEEM students today. Each student had a productive and positive day and we thank all of our hosts for their time and effort!
At the end of the long shadow day, groups headed into San Francisco to see the sights (isn't Lombard Street incredible?) and enjoy some great food (including some Ghiradelli chocolate). What a great Wednesday!
