Sam Gichuru

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.

San Francisco is warmer this morning, the weather is great for a walk and am excited to go meet an old friend,  I am going to meet my man Marlon Parker,… No I should write a special blog about Marlon parker but that is as soon as I visit Rlabs in South Africa.

Our place of meeting is Union Square where I find a group of San Francisco Police. Something about Cops in Stato in comparison to Kenyan Cops, is that they are very friendly and easy but they are alert and you can feel their eyes interrogating you, got to say its very intimidating yet… not threatening, Kenyan Cops are just very unfriendly, want to intimidate and threaten you and make you pay for being alive.. .. unaitwai wapi, Unatoka nani… , so I am feeling very friendly and ask the SFPD to take a photo with me.

SFPD are very friendly and willing one of them takes the camera asks the others to seat nicely and he starts clicking, actually the other stopped human traffic to get this done .. very cool, they ask and I answer, I am Kenyan visiting San Francisco .. suddenly  they are extremely excited, am I a runner? they almost ask in Unison, ha.. you have to like that, I am looking at their beaming faces and this is not the time to disappoint…really.. even you….of-course I am a runner, I tell them with a big smile on my face, ha….I actual Won the Karomaindo Marathon a while back and nobody has broken my record to date! .. the camera starts to click again…oh me oh my.

Some Celebrity photos are taken! and I am being given the celebrity treatment but I see the nice neat handcuffs and am starting to think, Sam your mother will not like this…. ,so what dint I know?  a Kenyan had just won the Bay to Break Marathon in San Francisco 2 days before! before they Google me up, I explain that in Kenya some marathons are not won by choice…. for example all they have to do to find out if I can run is shoot in the air, and so as for my glory in the Karomaindo Marathon my motivation was a group of 4 Urchins and the 3 hungry dogs who where determined to commandeer the loaf of bread I had been sent to buy, losing was not an option for that 6 year old boy, my mother was already tired of the many lost bread tales from me.

Karomaindo was a cluster of 5 shops  about 200 Meters from my home,…. the cop on my extreme right is laughing so hard he is almost chocking … figured am done here, safely and I walked into Union Square ready to reunite with an old friend who I always seem to meet in foreign countries.

At Stanford I was hosted by probably the first Kenyan from Northern Kenyan to get a Scholarship to Stanford, Jisas Lema is a very humble young man who spent a few hours showing me around campus and giving me a heads up about Stanford,  if you are reading this and you have a kid interested in computer science, I would suggest that be your first pick.

More info on this, we don’t want Stanford graduates having issues about my grammar esp when I write about their school..

Day 4 was full of activity, after I left Google, I was picked up by my good friend Mark and we headed to 320 pioneer way to chance and see the Y combinator offices and in my heart I prayed to meet Paul Graham. 45 min- 1 hour later, I had enjoyed a very inspiring conversation with Paul Graham and Kate Courteau who took their time to tell me how Y Combinator started (and the fact that it was not part of the plan, how about that) and the conversation has been going on for days now with a wider network of people included as well.

At this point I knew I had finished my now to be “first” visit successfully to silicon valley and I can head back the rift valley and do something with all the information I had learned, but that was not to be…. I ended up extending my stay with another 4 days and possibly heading for meetings back to Google to meet the VP, who later introduced me to people at MIT, Cambridge, LinkedIn, etc.

Y Combinator does pre-seed funding for start-ups , they have so far funded 360 companies to a tune of $5 Million and are currently worth $3Billion , Their model is very simple, pick good ideas at very early stage, pay the founders – usually not more than three, three months pay, and with this help you through the first phase, a demo day is set and you present your ideas to VC, Angel investors and if you can prove you know what you are talking about, you get the funding required and sometimes even bought out, some of their more successful companies that you probably know about are Dropbox, Airbnb, Loopt, Heroku, Scribd, Grepplin, Xobni, Justin.tv.. and you can keep counting until you get to 360! ..

Paul Graham had some interesting tips to share on how to select start-ups and taught me how to calculate the investment required for each incubated start-up, warned me not to investing in 1 single person, or over 4 people and he had good amusing reason for this among many others, and how many start-ups fail initially, this is no business for the faint hearted.

Paul Graham was generous enough to introduce me to his circle of friends including Megan Smith who is VP at google.org, noticeably for me was also the fact that he did it on the spot, not the usual Nairobi, “I will get back to you” or let me think about it, spot on. I get to realise how much we have to learn back home from successful investors and it all boils down to the basics.

I later went to Anybot met Travor briefly and spent a few minutes with Samson who showed me what the Anybot is all about, this article is a precursor to the main blog article coming soon, if I don’t draft them now, the excitement will keep getting to me, log back in for more on Y Combinator or follow me on Twitter for faster updates on my journeys

Ready about Day 5 and Others