What an awesome trip it has been hanging out in Palo Alto for the past few days in geek mecca. A magical place where geeks are rockstars and tech is humming.

I met Max Levchin, the guy who started Paypal and Slide and James Hong, who started “Hot or Not” and a ton of other powerful minds and VC’s - truly inspirational.

On the trip also did some cool visits:

Facebook

Even got a pic of the Facebook fridge : ) Free food all the time. And we thought Developers needed beer to produce fast.

Guitar Hero

The ultimate highlight was to watch Charles Huang  the founder and creator of Guitar Hero at RedOctane Games demoing the latest version of the game which has not been released yet. It was phenominal. And to hear the fairytale story was even cooler. What a down to earth guy. He took huge risks, could not get funding and then hit the jackpot. Version 3 did a Billion dollars sales. Nice. Read here

EA Games

EA games was spectacular but their sexy high-end campus was a major contrast to the more Homely environment at RedOctane which I preferred. But there were shit-hot demos of some new games on the best screen you have ever seen. That’s me on the EA sports basketball court which they actually use to report to shareholders. Different.

Stanford University

The geek, web entrepreneur sausage machine. They just keep coming. The campus is very impressive.
In another life I would have loved to study there. It occurred to me that on some campuses the Sporty guys get the girls. Here I think it’s the techno-wizards. Who would have thought that all the technical innovation comes down to sex!

So - it was an awesome excursion and also fantastic to meet the guys from all our businesses around the world. I bonded most with the Polish guys - who seem to like to smoke : )

And of course I got an iphone 3g - which is sick!

Off to bed. I have to catch a flight back to SA in 4 hours.