Bend Oregon . . . the next Palo Alto?
I hope not! I do sort of like this post, though it doesn’t compare to the angst in The Enemy Within . . . Backyard Clothesline in Bend Oregon, nor literary excellence or drama of Life in the Fast Lane. I like its theme of the hope that springs eternal. I also love the picture above taken by famous Sotheby’s photographer/broker Bryan Hilts.
Facebook (yes, that one) VP of Operations, Jonathon Heiliger was in Bend, not to talk about the real estate market, but rather to attend the Bend Venture Conference. He made some interesting remarks cited in the article below by KTVZ’s Barney Lerten.
‘Robust Investment Community,’ Environment Cited
BEND, Ore. — Maybe he was just being nice to his hosts, at least in part. But a vice president of Facebook told a Bend Venture Conference crowd Friday that Central Oregon “has the potential” to be as big – or bigger – than Palo Alto, California’s hotbed of high-tech entrepreneurs. “From the people in this room, it’s clear there’s a robust investment community in Bend,” Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of operations, said during the question-and-answer session of his talk. “I think Bend has the potential to be as good as Palo Alto — if not better,” Heiliger said, clearly trying to make up for (and save his plummeting “friends” count) from his earlier answer to a question about how someone here could be in such a thriving environment — “move?”
“What Sports are you into?”
Heiliger said he’d been confronted by many locals who asked what sports he was into, and he had to apologetically tell them, “I just met you — I work all the time. That’s what people do, where I’m from.” But with Facebook rapidly moving toward completion of its first company-owned data center in Prineville, Heiliger said that puts this region in the spotlight and primed for future growth. “Because of our presence here in Central Oregon, we hope other tech companies will come here and create companies,” he said. “I think you guys have a wonderful environment here,” Heiliger said.
“You should stay here and build great companies here.” Heiliger’s talk – streamed on the conference’s Website, of course – featured some of the astounding numbers behind the half-billion Facebook users, like 28 billion dynamically generated page views a day, “built just for you” — a “difficult challenge” to maintain and scale up to. The Facebook VP told of some of the many lessons learned along the way, such as the fact that “small teams have tremendous power,” like the two engineers who created the photo-sharing option that now has become the most popular in the world, despite lacking much of what the earlier and often whizzier (but “friction”-filled) photo-sharing Websites had to offer.
While New Year’s brings a big spike of photos posted and shared, the biggest are for Halloween, he noted. Then there’s the addition of news feeds – 10 percent of users at the time joined a page about hating it, the product manager actually got death threats, and it’s now the site’s most popular feature. “People now are at the center of product on the Web, in control of putting their information online,” Heiliger said. That’s been a big issue — privacy and control of information. Heiliger didn’t dive too deeply into that, but dis say, “We want to give people the same fine-grained control you have in your subconscious of what info you share,” which he admitted was “a really tough problem to do online and on the Web.” As for the topic of the conference, where several companies make their best pitch for a pot of venture cash, Heiliger said he’s invested in over 30 companies, such as Tango, a mobile videoconferencing app. “Some good, some not so good” companies, he said. “I’ve written off a lot, learned a lot along the way.” Key for Heiliger is a big potential market for a product, and to “work with people who I like.”
