Sean McGee is reporting from ESTEEM’s Spring Break trip to Silicon Valley each day this week.
On Tuesday, we returned to WeWork, where ESTEEM students Helga Feizsthuber, Ben Hoggan, James Sallee, Derek Athy, John Vernon, and I competed in a mini pitch competition. The judges were Tim Connors, founder of PivotNorth Capital; Jim Marshall, managing director of Silicon Valley Bank; Richard Pivnicka, Honorary General Consul of the Czech Republic; Chris Stevens, a cofounder of Keurig Premium Coffee System; and Hans Koch, CEO and cofounder of NGI (Stealth). Current entrepreneurs from Blue Planet, Nova, and Ve-Go also competed. Feizsthuber won the competition.
We had lunch in San Francisco at West of Pecos, a restaurant run by a family of Silicon Valley restaurateurs. Then ESTEEM alum John Flatley led us on a tour of Google including the Google Garage, their hacker space and prototyping shop equipped with 3D printers.
Later, we attended the Notre Dame California Initiative launch party and networking event at the innovation center GSVlabs. We had a late dinner at In-N-Out Burger, the first time that many of the students had experienced the famous regional restaurant.