Recap: Digital Day 2010 NYC

15 students trekked up to New York City to visit Microsoft and Dogpatch Labs. Digital Day seeks to expose students who are passionate about tech and entrepreneurship to real world companies both on the large corporation side and innovative startups side.

At Microsoft, Paul Treichler and Sean Seibel brought us to the Microsoft Envisioning Center, a showroom with all the up and coming technologies that demonstrate how Microsoft sees technology will change the world. The focus of this talk was how computing will change in the future. We got the opportunity to get our hands on the Microsoft Surface and lots of big touch screen LCDs targeted at the consumer end.

We then went to Dogpatch Labs, a startup incubator run by former Googler Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg). Dogpatch was an interesting place as it was essentially one huge white room with desks that served as the office space for over 10 startups. Jon spoke to us about Dogpatch’s philosophy behind injecting collaboration into the process innovation. The startups literally sit right next to each other and can bounce ideas off of each other. Jon provided a very unique and refreshing perspective on pursuing a career through pursuing your passions. He gave us a lot no BS super candid advice. His key takeaway for us was that if we wanted to get into the startup space, the best thing to do is to simply get our hands dirty and start something. That something does not have to be anything special. He described how he had a very simple idea that he wrote up and outsourced to a developer through elance. It cost him about $500 to develop what he would describe as a very rudimentary Twitter app. This project however got the attention of some very important people in the VC community and got him meetings he would have not been able to get otherwise. His point was that the value is not necessarily always in the end product, but in the act of doing the project and what you learn along the way. So even if you have an idea that is not exactly revolutionary, but is just a simple and somewhat useful tool, go ahead and invest $500 in outsourcing and get it made! Every great idea has to start at a baby step. Jon also wrote a post on his blog about our visit.

We think this event was a huge success and hope to do another by the end of the semester focusing on agencies!