For my last post of the summer, I went back through my journal and jotted down some of my favorite memories from the summer. Think of this as a broad overview of everything that happened this summer.

Long List of Memories!

- Living in the Marina (Best views and girls in the city)
- Riding the slide at Google and Nachos at FB
- Happy Hours at start-ups in the City
- Hatching new business ideas at the bar with strangers
- First group breakfast at the Brickhouse Cafe and first B-Stock lunch in Menlo Park
- “If anyone offers you a billion dollars for your company, you take it – no questions” – Howard at B-Stock
- Working in the oDesk Office (Ping Pong!)
- Any story involving eBay or PayPal or anything from the tech bubble
- SF Festival Season and Awesome Weather (and roof parties!)
- Being given a copy of Oh the Places You’ll Go as required reading material
- “California should be bought by Canada … It’ll make everyone happier” – Jasper
- Watching Hiten on Twitter
- Finally learning what cloud computing actually means (Thanks Structure and Puneet)
- Slip N Slides at Dolores Park
- Any night that started in the Triangle and ended at Ruby Sky (or in anyway involved the Mission)
- Wine tasting in Sonoma
- Meeting with people I grew up learning and reading about
- Getting enough book recommendations to satiate my need for reading materials until I turn 80
- Every Thursday at the True office
- Four-Hours worth of reading and TED Videos during my commute each day
- Hilarious emails from John Burke about I-Banking
- The food in the city (Have some awesome recommendations if you’re interested …)

Finally, as excited as I am to go back to school, I will miss SF a lot.

For future potential interns, this program is the best experience you could ever have over a summer. You will learn more than anywhere else from the people who have been through it all before. I highly highly recommend it.

Also, since this is my last post, I figured I should take advantage of the situation to shamelessly plug myself on the internet.

To find me elsewhere:

- Twitter
- Facebook
- GreenbackUniversity (Re-Launch September 2009)
- Children’s Hope (Follow Me in India Starting August 8!)

To catch up for weeks 6:

1. Meet the people you read about everyday

This week, Danny Shader, who is currently a CEO for one of True Venture’s portfolio companies came in to speak with us during our weekly lunch meeting.

As a sophomore in college, I was given the book “E-Boys” which is billed as “The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work.” The book follows the founding members of Benchmark Partners from the launch of the fund in 1995 through the firms initial investments in companies such as E-Bay and WebVan to the firm’s rise to prominence as a Tier 1 VC firm. The book was my first exposure to the venture industry and truly peaked my interest in emerging technology and technology investing.

Late in the book, as an EIR at Benchmark, Danny Shader makes an appearance as he launches Accept.com, the first C2C online payment platform.

The opportunity to learn and talk to Danny about his experiences brought new meaning to everything I had learned about his experience with Accept.com. He added colorful anecdotes and other insight which added a new layer to understanding to my reading of the book and the venture industry.

This experience is not unique. My 6 weeks in San Francisco with True Ventures have given me more exposure to industry professionals than I could have ever imagined. I have been able to meet C-Level executives and entrepreneurs who I previously could have only had access to through their blog or online videos. This has been an amazing addition to my experience this summer in the valley, and something I could have only dreamed about back at college.

2. Lessons from Danny Shader Presented without Comment

Money and Ideas are plentiful in the Valley, but what’s missing are people who embody these four characteristics:

1. Have Integrity
2. Work Really Hard
3. Be Really Smart
4. Have Character

Though you can’t really control key 3, you can control the others, and should live everyday in the best way possible. Remember – your life is far longer than your current job – and the valley is a small place.

3. Went on an excursion to Alcatraz this weekend (… sometimes you just do touristy things …)

Cool place with lots of interesting history. But seriously – those prisoners had one of the best views in the world (when they were not locked in a jail sell)

That’s it for now. You can also find me at the B-Stock Solutions Blog or on Twitter. Two summer posts left ….

Some notes from week 5:

1. Keep looking forward to your next challenge

Back in week 1, I had a discussion with the B-Stock Solutions team about business building. The advice they offered was: “Keep looking forward to the next business you’re trying to surpass … when you start looking back to just protect what you have – that’s when you fall apart.”

The example they gave was PayPal. PayPal never wanted to just be the biggest online payment platform – they want to be the biggest everywhere payment platform. Once they became market dominant in the online space – they changed their target from beating other other online players to beating Visa – the world’s largest purchase platform. Doing this not only galvanizes employees but it gives your company’s work purpose everyday.

Last week’s announcement of the Google Chrome OS gave that lesson another face. It demonstrates that Google was never just thinking about controlling the search space or even just the online applications space. They were always thinking about taking down the world’s largest (possibly evilest) technology company in Microsoft. Whether or not it succeeds – it is a case example of given their employees purpose everyday.

2. Pick one and go long.

One of our Thursday speaker’s was Brad Garlinghouse, ex-SVP at Yahoo. I learned more lessons, both personal and professional, in an hour with Brad than in my portfolio theory class all last semester.

On the professional side, Brad emphasized the need for companies to start with one task – and be the best at that – before growing into other verticals.

At this time, the internet is no experiencing rapid growth and is arguably starting to mature. A consumer’s time online is becoming scarce and to get a new user on my site, it means I am taking that user’s time away from another website. In order to do that – my site needs to add more value to that users’ life than my competitors site.

To succeed, your site needs to be the best at something. Once you’re the best at that, then worry about taking down other markets.

3. Your job is to make your boss look good … seriously

My favorite of Brad’s personal life lessons to us. It was meant half in jest but in the end, its totally true. If your boss looks good – he’s happy – and a happy boss leads to a happy job for you. Doesn’t apply in all situations … but its definitely something to keep in mind.

4. Went on a bike ride up the Headlands on Sunday. Tons of fun. It was tough to walk on Monday. However, the views from the top were AWESOME.

And as any kid on a bike with a hill would do … I decided to video my descent down the backside of the mountain. Unfortunately, it came out really poorly and if you watched it to the end, you could see the reason NOT to tape yourself while riding down a hill. The video below is of a far better biker with an awesome bullet cam … but it serves the same albeit less humorous purpose.

To catch up for weeks 4:

1. Sales is a surprisingly tactical part of business.

I have spent a few weeks now working with our VP of Sales learning how to develop a sales strategy and then working to implement that strategy. Within the sales function, the amount of legwork that goes into sourcing leads, cold-calling and determining the right pitch is astounding. The most important take-away from me was how important trial-and-error is to determining the correct strategy. The key is to bring your strategy to your consumers and then iterate using your results letting the market determine your pitch. Test, correct, and repeat.

2. Try, fail, try again

I’m working my way through Steven Blank’s book The Four Steps to Epiphany. One of the core lessons in the book is the same as the take-away from my work in sales. Rather than spend immense amounts of time and capital investing in an idea before its a proven concept – take the concept to market and work with your consumers to develop the product they want.

These lessons were driven in by our talks with Hiten at KissMetrics. Our discussions centered around developing new business ideas and one of the central concepts to the discussion was the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP). Simply a minimum viable product (MVP) is anything that allows you to test your business concept with just the necessary features in order to get feedback from early adopters. With the low cost options available for web-development, advertising and analytics, today, your MVP could be as simple as setting up Facebook ads to see the click-thru. It’s amazing what you can do with technology today.

3. It’s a Deal!

Best lesson from Jasper at Bloomspot – a deal is just a time sensitive call to action. Want to cause consumer action? – make sure they have a reason to do it now!

It has been an awesome week with B-Stock Solutions and GigaOM’s Structure ’09 Conference.

Realizations from this week:

1. Everyday here is a learning adventure.

When I get home I find myself filling my journal with pages and pages of new things I have learned throughout the day – from finance to cloud computing to Indian Venture Capital. Everyone here seems to have a story and an amazing background- and most are willing to talk to you if you want to listen.

2. The world is changing so quickly.

At GigaOM’s Structure conference yesterday, I watched some of the people at the forefront of industry talk about the new research and products that are still in for development tomorrow. The moment when HP’s Cloud Guru Russ Daniels pronounced that the future was “Everything as a Service” represents a major shift in the IT industry. And it is all happening right now.

3. Choose the red route and pack light.

This week I finished “Raising the Bar” by the founder of Clif Bar, Gary Erickson. The many lessons in the book were driven home by my experience at Structure. In a time when everything is changing quickly, you have to run your business in a way that is unique and able to change directions quickly. Don’t do what everyone else is doing – especially as a start-up – because you will find yourself a bike getting knocked off the 8-lane highway.

That’s it for now. You can also find me at the B-Stock Solutions Blog or on Twitter. See you next week.

oDesk is an online marketplace for work teams.  In a simple sense, it allows the buyer to outsource tasks from the simplest data input to the most complicated web design to providers worldwide.  Even in High School when I started my first business, I used to use oDesk to provide graphics for T-Shirts and CDs.

So this week when we started developing an SEO strategy for the new website, many of the tasks were going to be exceptionally simple and time consuming.  Fortunately, the first suggestion was to outsource some of the tasks on oDesk.  Within minutes of putting the job on oDesk, over 7 people had already applied with wage rates as low as 77 cents an hour.

Marketplaces such as oDesk are changing the landscape for businesses.  As it grows, the traditional rules for outsourcing and hiring people are going to be thrown out the window.  The idea that at 18, I had two “employees” working for me is still ridiculous to my parents and I.

However, it does illustrate the opportunity for businesses in the future.  With marketplaces such as oDesk driving down the costs and barriers to developing an idea into a product, funding becomes less important at the seed stage.  It will enable everyone with even the smallest of technical acumen to take their ideas and apply them in the real world.  Get ready.

My name is Adam D’Augelli and I am a rising senior studying economics at the University of Florida.

This summer I am working with B-Stock Solutions. B-Stock Solutions helps Fortune 2000 Retailers and Manufacturers improve recovery on liquidation inventory by 20 – 100% by building, hosting and operating private label auction marketplaces that automate the selling process.

B-Stock Solutions currently has three executives. A CEO, a VP of Technology, and a VP of Sales. We sit in four open cubicles within one of the sides of the oDesk office.

The retail and manufacturing companies that we partner with all have upwards of 30 and 40 executives with massive organizational support. Costco Wholesale, for example, has 118 executives. In these types of organizations, executive positions are very tightly defined and often have one specific oversight role.

Ridiculously Specific Job Titles include:

- SVP of General Merchandising Manager Consumables and Perishables

- SVP Retail Training, Leadership Development, and Women’s Leadership Forum

- Director Supply Chain Strategy

The massive division of labor by the major retailers and manufacturers, though somewhat necessitated by size, also illustrates why big companies cannot move as fast as start-ups. For a decision to get made, multiple horizontal and vertical levels of management needs to love the idea and then the rest of the company involved needs to have buy-in for change to occur.

Of course, it would be difficult to run a massive conglomerate the same way a start-up is run. It wouldn’t make sense to run as quickly or to take as much risk. However, it does demonstrate that there will always be opportunities for start-ups worldwide to work hard to develop new technology and to drive innovation forward.