On my recent visit to California I was lucky enough to be invited to Google’s Mountain View office by Simon Smith the design manager of Google Apps to give a talk . The talk was about how I built my career around social media particularly with Flickr. It has to be said there was a certain amount of serendipity involved in my career and this is reflected in the talk. You can watch the 1 hour talk in below in full.
The Google campus is amazing. My talk was in the central part of the campus. My friend Cody Bratt who works on Google talk had to cycle a mile from his office on another part of campus to see me talk. Make no mistake this place is massive! The most amazing thing about the visit was the legendary Google food court. There was about 10 different food vendors dishing food from Chinese to Indian to good old burgers and frys. All for free! I settled for chicken curry but I saw some people going for it – one guy had curry, fries and a hot dog. All the basic food groups covered.
360 view of Google campus shot on my Lomographic spinner 360°
My dotcom tour did not begin and end with Google. Before my Google visit I dropped into the Flickr HQ and witnessed what can only be described as an all out war in their office, more about that later. I think I might do a little post of the crazy things you find at the big dotcoms. Later on that week I had lunch at Twitter’s HQ in San Francisco with some of my fellow phoot campers (I am lomokev on twitter by the way). Trammell, fellow Phoot camper and Twitter employee, invited me to that one. Unlike Google, Twitter has a set menu. It was incurably tasty – home made burger and fries. After the Twitter lunch I dropped into Photojojo’s HQ in the mission.
Amit Gupta Photojojo CEO (“work hard and be nice to people” poster by Anthony Burrill)
Big thanks to all the people at Google, Flickr, Twitter and Photojojo who let me crash there work places in San Fransisco in August.
Thanks for sharing the Google talk video, Kevin. That was really interesting. Nice the way the did it so we could see your presentation too.
In other news: now you have me lusting after a spinner. damn you, man!
Great talk Kev! Some good information you passed out. Thanks for sharing.
geez! you’ve got it going on~ as I remember you used to be around.. then you got into these books and that’s about the only time I notice anything from you. guess I’m just not hanging in the same social nets as you are, you’re doing great!