This day was to be my last business day, so I figured it’s time to stop and reflect… but I had one final place to visit, with no appointments. That meant I had to knock on some doors and be brave — don’t try this at home!  I was well received in some offices, while others knocked the wind out of me. This is the story of building 410 Townsend.

Building 410 hosts Yammer, OpenDNS, Shop it to me and TechCrunch – for the techies at the Nailab or Ihub, it’s not so glamorous as you might imagine, but the things that happen in the building are an entirely different story.

Straight to the things that excite most of us, David Ulevitch started OpenDNS in college in 2006, less than 5 years ago, and before that he ran Everydns.  Today OpenDNS has over 23 million users, and he has received funding from Minor Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock and the like. I can guarantee you these are VCs you want to mingle with.

DNS translates what you type in the address bar that helps you find the website you are looking for.

If you typed www.samgichuru.com and you arrived here, that was partly DNS at work.  I am learning that there is an authoritative and a recursive DNS —  have I lost the non techies? I doubt I can write it any better for the techies and non techies than David has in his blog.  To cut a long story short, OpenDNS is all about the recursive DNS.

The most interesting part of the conversation was that OpenDNs might be considering putting a Node in Nairobi, so you might want to pay attention to that if this is your thing.

Too bad for me but everyone at Tech Crunch was in New York for Disrupt (so what was I doing in California when I should have been in NY?).  Someone asked me why I didn’t go to Facebook or Twitter? I did go to Palo Alto but did not make it to Facebook, since I really didn’t have much to do there. I later went to Twitter, but without an appointment, all I could do was hang out with the front desk girl who allowed me to take a few photos… or did she?

All in all a great day with good experiences, but you  might want to think twice before you decide to knock on doors without warning;  it’s not for the faint hearted.

The first time I heard of sales force was a couple of years ago, I was disappointed, the application was so amazing but I could not download it, cloud computing was confusing to African Techs back then, actually let’s just say I was disappointed I could not pirate it, (yes, I know, you have never use bootlegged copies of anything… no clue what am talking about) among other problems my tribesmen could not tell if it was crowd or cloud the “r” and “l” problems are going to be here for a while …

Fast forward to day two in San Francisco, I am to meet the VP of all things fun at Sales Force Foundation, am running late not sure I want to bump into Ahmed today so I keep a look out for him, not because I don’t want to talk to him, but I don’t have time, actually later I intend to go look for him.

From the moment I walked into the office, I learn what systems and process are, am embarrassed, I know for a fact I want my office to be like that, I sign into the system and within a minute this lovely lady comes out to meet me! No way to describe such efficiency… you have to see it, from the door to the office everybody has a warm smile and looks genuinely happy! we go to one of the  Caribbean Hawaiian conference rooms  and I get to meet one of the software developers.

Julies email titled said “VP of All Things Fun, Meaningful & Rewarding” and we end up having a great fun conversation, she is warm and loves Sales Force Foundation, she is the Head of Global Integrated Philanthropy and I get to learn how the foundation started, its achievements, employee participation, I learn about Marc Benioff and I get a copy of his book “Behind The Cloud”!.. Marc Started Salesforce 11 years ago in an apartment in San Francisco and today it’s a billion dollar company , 1% equity was put aside for the foundation, that was a forward thinking cool dude, who wanted to give back to society.

Julie is not done and she introduces me to a big group of CEO’s and Founders of successful cool start-ups like Gimiso, Justspotted, thenextweb, huddle, skimlinks, usefunnel!

One thing for sure is I want to be a VP, CEO, Chairman, name it.. of something fun meaningful and rewarding, but more so I want to radiate it like Julie does, with energy focus, drive, skills, knowledge and an amazing network.

I am reading the book ” Behind The Cloud” currently and I feel that day 2 has to be written in many parts … summarizing this story is like telling a hungry Massai to smell Nyama Choma without eventually getting to eat it, not going to work,…  basically I will be adding links and useful information to this blog post… in the meantime let me email Marc Benioff… follow me on Twitter for faster updates on my journeys

Day 3 | Meeting at Kiva and other Fun people