Home is Where the Hard Disk Lies

While looking for a short-term place to live I ran into Silvia, a very interesting Italian twenty-something and walking case study for our product (but she doesn’t know that yet, of course). Silvia is wrapping up her PHD at Stanford, while concurrently working for a start-up software company. AND pursuing her passion for travel. In-between listening to her sales pitch about why I should sublet her place while she roams around Europe and South East Asia I hit her up for some information on her working life. Besides the obvious question “Does she ever sleep?” I was really curious to know HOW she does it. Particularly, what are her work processes when she’s in the wilds of India with unpredictable communication capabilities, and work demands continue uninterrupted in Palo Alto. The good news (for my hypothesis at least) is she still depends to a large extent on local processing power to do her job.

Her core toolkit on the road consists of a mini laptop (Sony Vaio, I think), several thumb drives, and a headset for making internet phone calls. A bevy of USB cables and an external battery brick round out the package, hardware-wise. Desktop document creation applications used include Excel, Word and PowerPoint, with PDF creation to ensure format retention. With this setup she could go for days without connecting to the internet. The reality is she rarely goes longer than a day without checking in.

“I am a founding team member, so I do a little bit of everything,” she tells me.” Right now I am mostly doing market research, recruiting, and organizing events.”

So getting online is an integral part of her business, both for collaborating with her co-workers as well as doing external-facing activities. She and other team members use Google Docs for some document creation, particularly early-stage drafts where formatting is not critical (Microsoft Office and PDF creation come in pretty quickly when document appearance is critical). The company maintains an externally-accessible wiki where ideas and referential information can be shared. Internet-accessible e-mail. Skype. Go to Meeting for client and investor presentations. LinkedIn and FaceBook for building out her raft of contacts, personal and professional across the globe.

So, I muse, with all these data sources, all these spots where information is stored – documents, contacts, messages, bits of information hither and yon – where does the DEFINITIVE document live? The one you need to grasp quickly and repeatedly, wherever you are?

I follow her eyes to the Vaio on the table. “Hey! It works, why complicate things!” She grins, shrugs and slips it in her bag.