It’s “Summit” season.

My employer is a sprawling concern, with people working in sites all across the world. The home office is in Seattle (the one true timezone–Pacific Time), but we also encamp in Silicon Valley (multiple sites), Austin, Denver, Nashville, Greater D.C., NYC, and Greater Boston. And that’s just the “big” sites–other smaller enclaves dot the country, and that doesn’t scratch the surface of our worldwide presence in Corporate.

Anyway, it’s difficult to form and sustain relationships with people you’ve never met in-person before, so 1x-2x per year, we get teams together for summits. Everyone sits in the same room for a couple of days and talks about topics. But, here’s the secret: That’s not the real purpose.

The real purpose is what happens after the meetings are over, when the drinks flow freely and you do events like Axe Throwing, Go Kart racing, Laser Tag, or Rollercoasters. People drop the pretention and gel a bit. My team had just such a summit 2 weeks ago, and it was great. I think we’re poised to act as one going forward.

So, great, what about Silicon Valley?

Well, my boss decided to host a summit in SV, despite only 1 of his reports/teams hosting there. Austin would’ve made more sense, but here we are.

Flying into SJC

Devil’s choice: Go with my preferred airline, or go with the nonstop flight? Delta has only 1-stop flights (LAX or SLC) to get from AUS to SJC. I generally prefer delta as I’m part of their rewards program, but a simple 3.5 hr direct flight on Southwest beckoned. So I went southwest with their new rules and “identity”

In short–it wasn’t bad and I’d happily fly Southwest again. “Having” a seat and not obsessing about checking-in to get a given boarding Group A/B/C so you avoid the dreaded (inevitable) middle seat–love it. My employer will happily pay for a slighty upgraded seat and the reward program seems to just work. I’m pleased to see no nuts on the plane, still, and they don’t have carts for drink service.

Landing in SJC was easy and my colleague “took a car” (rented an Avis Hyundai Sonata) so I had a complementary ride to my hotel

Room at Element Santa Clara

Short version: Stay here.

Element Santa Clara registers as a Mariott hotel, but it was created by Westin. It has the Westin beds, which means you can sleep.

My room featured a full suite layout with a separate living room/tv area, full kitchen, and shower only (no bath).

I came home to my TempurPedic and honestly I’d rather be in the bed at the Element. It’s that good.

Waymo

My colleague took me out to dinner the first evening in his Hyundai Ioniq5, and pointed out the new “Waymo” cars to me. Honestly, this wasn’t new–we’ve had Waymo in austin for years now. However, I’ve never used one.

After this week, I definitely will be using them.

I downloaded the App and it automatically set itself up to use Apple Pay. I added my Corporate Card as primary payment and from there it was really trivial to use the service. Some thoughts:

1. You have full control over the seat positioning (legroom) in the car
2. You have full control over the HVAC. This is SO much better than the Lyft drivers in Seattle who run with the windows cracked and the HVAC off. I always get carsick. Not here
3. The “dropoff” location isn’t always static. One day it dropped me off in the circle in front of our building, the ideal location. The next day it dropped me by the curb across from the building, which put me in a puddle of mud.
4. You never have to tip.
5. There’s no chit-chat
6. There’s a “contact support” button on the screen in the car for either front- or back-seat passengers
7. They’re always “watching” you via cameras but not listening–listening only engaged if you press the contact support button.

We’re about a decade later on autonomos “Robotaxis” than expected, but it was a good experience.

The Vibe

The weather is amazing. It was 45 at night, around 65-70 during the morning.

The “California” vibe seems present–people commuting on bikes, long-boards, etc.

People company hop all the time. NVIDIA corporate offices are right next to ours in Santa Clara. One expressed frustration from a Senior Principal Engineer was, “With hiring frozen everywhere, we haven’t seen people move very much to spread the knowledge around.

I think that last is the real key to Silicon Valley. It’s kind of like the Manhattan Project–all these great, energetic minds living and working in a 25 mile radius has second- and third-order effects going back to the 1960s.

The Exhaustion

Jetlag is a real mother, and it gets worse as I get older. The first night I was there, I was up until 11:30pm PT (1:30 CT) working on a presentation for the summit on Day 1. I was the first presentation to kick-off the summit, and it went very well. Overall, Day one was good, living on adrenaline and coffee.

Then we went out to dinner at a Turkish place. We weren’t out too late, but again, probably 11:30 PM according to my body clock.

By day two, I hated everyone for living, to borrow a phrase from my late mother. I gutted it out, but definitely got some “You’re not acting like you usually do” feedback from my colleagues.

No, umm….this is who I actually am, folks. The facade is just gone.

Dinner day two was ad-hoc (the summit was over) so we just got burgers with a couple of Software Engineers I particularly like. We solved world piece, discussed some Chinese phrases. Apparently Mandarin has a 4-character idiom that’s the analogue to “Schadenfreude”, 幸災樂禍 meaning “to take joy in calamity and rejoice the disaster”.

Working with so many other cultures is cool, though I did stand-in-place of all 330M Americans, getting scolded for how little history/geography we know of other cultures. Fair enough.

Trip Summary

I’ve been to Cupertino area 3 times before, and this was my first time hanging around Santa Clara and Mountain View. It’s a neat area and I’d love to spend more time there.