Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Today was a very interesting day. To avoid the problem we had yesterday, we made sure we were early.

Yesterday, we answered mail in between the sessions.

Today was somewhat different. We arrived on time, but later than others, and the room was full:

There wasn't much room to work:

Yesterday, we started the "University Workshop" (aka the "Silicon Valley immersion week").

These are the speakers who will teach us all about doing business in the US:

We started our first full day in the valley with a visit to the mall.

We had a special request from somebody named Isabelle H.: we need more pictures with Valérie.
Eat your heart out Astrid Bryan, because here's Valérie with her pimped out chromed out Ford Escape:

This is what we had in our shopping cart:

I woke up at 3:40 AM yesterday, and by the time it was 5:30 I was at the Brussels airport for a short flight to Amsterdam. Normally, there was a flight at 10:20 from Amsterdam straight to San Francisco, but we didn't have any luck: first the flight was delayed until 13:10.

In the last few weeks, I've worked hard on a slide deck and a 10-minute talk explaining my business. The last few days mainly consisted of "killing my darlings". That is: removing slides and text to make my pitch as concise as possible. Now I'm making a second slide deck with the content that didn't make it into the pitch. I'm going to use that slide deck to anticipate "unexpected" questions.
For instance: Why did you come to Silicon Valley? There's a well-founded answer to that question, and there's a simple answer.