Tag Archives: Facebook

HBA Company Field Trip Takes Students to San Francisco

Date
Posted by
Comments0
HBA Company Field Trip Takes Students to San Francisco

Written by Michelle Zhang

This past weekend, BHP students traveled to San Francisco, California to tour tech giants Google, Facebook, and Adobe, and to see the sights. Despite the gloomy clouds and uncharacteristically rainy days, students enjoyed visiting company campuses, hearing from alumni panels, and taking in the laid-back California scene.

Visiting the Facebook office.

The first company visit was to Facebook, where they received a warm welcome from BHP and Plan II alumna Surveen Singh and were given a comprehensive tour of the Facebook campus. Designed by Disneyland engineers, the campus was illuminated by vibrant, colorful walls and typographic signs showing off the various restaurants and amenities available to employees (including a dentistry, barbershop, and dry cleaners!). Students were particularly excited to spend a few minutes in the arcade, stocked full of old-school games such as Street Fighter and Dance Dance Revolution. The tour concluded with an alumni meet-and-greet at the Sweet Shop, where students and BHP graduates chatted over plates of smores cupcakes and lemon poppyseed bars.

The group outside of the Google office.

Next on the list was Google, where alumna Elyse May provided a quick walk-around tour of the Googleplex campus. Immediately hit by the scent of the food trucks parked outside, students continued through the fields of lawn chairs and volleyball courts — all painted Google primary colors, of course — and past such eccentricities as a large-scale model of a dinosaur skeleton. Back in the building, an alumni panel greeted students and answered questions ranging from undergraduate degree focuses to work culture.

Last on the company visits was Adobe, where students got to see the clean, modern architectural layout of the offices and amenities. The tour showed off Adobe’s recreation center, which featured ping-pong tables and large television screens, as well as its affordable and delicious cafeteria. Students spent some time at the earthquake-proof skybridge, peering out over the San Francisco landscape, before heading into the employee panel full of representatives from departments ranging from HR to finance. After the panel, students munched on some light appetizers and networked at tables with the employees on the panel, getting to ask some more in-depth questions about their experiences at Adobe.

Students in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Afterwards, students headed off into the city on their own that Friday night and Saturday afternoon. Popular destinations included the Golden Gate Bridge, Haight-Ashbury district, Ghiradelli Square, and Chinatown. For dinner, students met up at Firenze by Night in Little Italy to enjoy a five-course meal with various BHP alumni working in the area.

Come Sunday, students left the vibrant Bay Area to head back home, now dreaming of summer internships in sunny San Francisco on the creative campuses of Facebook, Google, and Adobe. Thanks to HBA Financial Committee for putting on a great CFT!

Student Profile: Ryan Lieberman – Co-Founder of Camp SPARK

Date
Posted by
Comments0
Student Profile: Ryan Lieberman – Co-Founder of Camp SPARK

Ryan Lieberman, a freshman in the program, started Camp SPARK, with his brother Blake, in the Summer of 2010. As a freshman in high school, Ryan knew he wanted to gain experience in operating a business. He decided to merge his passions for community service and athletics to create Camp SPARK. The camp has come a long way from the first session held in Ryan’s backyard. It is now available nationwide. Learn more about Camp SPARK and Ryan’s plans for the future as a BHP student.

What is Camp SPARK?

SPARK stands for Strong Powerful Athletic Rocking Kids. The camp is as much about sportsmanship as it is sports and it helps kids learn social skills in a way that they can easily connect with and understand, through sports and activities. At Camp SPARK, campers play games altered to the camp such as “Extreme Duck, Duck Goose.” Children ages 5–13 can participate in Camp SPARK. It’s a camp run by kids, for kids, because the set-up is unique in that it’s a business opportunity for high school students to start camps for younger kids.

How were you inspired to start the camp?

I’m very much an entrepreneurial-type of person. I love the idea of being my own boss and working for myself. So, the summer after my freshman year of high school I started thinking of ways that I could start my own business to gain experience being my own boss and familiarize myself with the processes involved in building a business.

I’ve always been passionate about community service and have been very active in Big Brothers Big Sisters. The bond I built with my “little” is a big part of what inspired me to reach out to children. I love the idea of directly influencing someone’s life and seeing change happen – knowing you were part of it. As for the idea of a camp, I went to summer camp all my life and just loved it. I knew opening a camp would be fun, something I could do well, and it would lead to a good experience.

The support of my parents was also influential. My dad is my biggest role model and he really encouraged me to do what I love and run the show.

How did you get the camp up and running?

The first summer, my parents were very supportive of what I was trying to accomplish and agreed to sponsor the start-up of Camp SPARK. The camp was run out of my backyard the first year. To get campers, my brother and I called and emailed over a hundred parents from our school directory and got 12 campers to enroll for the week. I didn’t make a lot of money the first summer, however I learned a lot of lessons.

The next summer I was a lot more organized and a much better marketer. I set up a Facebook page and sent out a video link to my email list. I also received a lot of good word of mouth promotion.  Participation almost tripled to 35 kids a day. I ran the camp twice as long and profited nearly $13,000. The next year, we created a website and increased marketing. A larger facility became a necessity. I negotiated a deal with my school and relocated the camp. It worked out really well. That’s about the time I realized that I had a reproducible business and that if I could do this, other people could too. I began looking for city partners to initiate Camp SPARK in their area. Not just in Texas, but nationwide. We opened a girls’ camp that summer and our first camp outside of Dallas with my cousin Zach in Austin and they both went really well.

The following year we put an ad on Facebook and everything really took off from there. Over the last four summers we have grown from a backyard camp into a nine-location business in five cities across the country (Dallas, Austin, San Francisco, Boston and Denver). Hundreds of kids are now Camp SPARK campers.  We have four boys’ camps, five girls’ camps, six city partners and employ over 60 people.  We have an accountant, a lawyer and an insurance agent. We have learned how to create really good systems and how to protect our business and ourselves.

Each camp is tailored to the location. For example, in San Francisco, the surrounding neighborhood has a lot of under-privileged kids, so that camp is corporate sponsored and doesn’t charge campers and places a special emphasis on reinforcing the importance of education. It’s important to know the community and the needs of that community so a difference can be made.

What does the future hold for Camp SPARK?

I hope Camp SPARK continues to be as successful as it has been. Now that I’ve started college, I still want to grow Camp SPARK and keep it as a source of income, but I’m looking for someone to take over my role of overseeing all of the operations. Starting and running the camp has been an amazing experience and now I’m ready to see what my next endeavor will be.

What does the future hold for you?

Running a sports camp has been a lot of fun and a great experience.  I plan to start more businesses and hopefully continue with sports-related work, but not necessarily in the camp setting. I know I ultimately want to be my own boss, so any experience I can continue to gain in operating businesses would definitely be of interest to me. My plan is to use what I am learning to pursue my next business ideas and also to help other kids start their own businesses.  One of the things I am excited about within the Business Honors program is the people in it.  I am going to have great classmates to learn and work with, and hopefully one day start businesses together with.

Facebook’s Doug Wolfe Shares Journey with BHP Students

Date
Posted by
Comments0

Doug Wolfe, the head of Online Operations for Facebook in Austin spoke to the BHP sophomores last week during their lyceum course. He captured the students’ attention with riveting tales of his time in the military and sound career advice. His path is anything but typical, but he explained that there is a common thread, even if it may not be fully apparent at first glance.

Wolfe attended Officer Candidate School when he was an undergraduate and spent nine years as a U.S. Marine Corps Officer. His specialty was in logistics and he went on multiple deployments, including Operation Iraqi Freedom. He then earned his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, while simultaneously serving as a Naval ROTC instructor at the school. He then spent four years at Morgan Stanley & Co. in institutional services. When he realized he didn’t want to do investment banking anymore, he spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out what it was that he wanted to do. He finally focused on doing what he loved to in an industry he found compelling, finding an operations and organizational leadership role at Facebook in 2010. He recently assumed the position of head of online operations for Facebook’s Austin office.

So what is the common thread? Chaos said Wolfe. He talked about the chaos that exists in serving in the military, where you are consistently faced with new challenges; the chaos that exists in the financial markets; and the chaos that ensues from trying to meet the needs of billions of Facebook users. “I like working in chaos, with some amount of control. The environment keeps you agile. There is value in inefficiency and the space it creates to innovate and learn.”

Leadership and ethics are the two focus areas for the lyceum course and Wolfe said his philosophies on both were heavily shaped by the Marine Corp.

As a leader, he tries to find the best position for someone based on their skill sets, shape them in that role, and then give them the autonomy and practice they need to execute on their own. He stressed the importance of understanding people’s motivations, so you can emotionally connect them to what they are doing.

When talking about ethics, Wolfe recounted the old motto of, ‘You are what you do.’ “Integrity is a bridge between your words and actions,” he said. He explained that Facebook has five values, and one of those is to build trust. He takes that seriously and said that seeing the consistent reflection of Facebook’s five values in their actions is part of what attracted him to working for the company.

Several students asked questions alluding to criticism that Facebook has faced from their users over the years in response to changes made to the platform. “We are user-driven, not necessarily user-led,” said Wolfe. “We have a ship-evaluate-change-ship again philosophy. If you aren’t trying something new, someone else will, and you will lose your position as the market-leader.”