Some pictures from South Africa

Here are a couple pictures of where I am living and working--more interesting stuff to come for sure after this weekend, when I fly to Cape Town. I haven't had much of a chance to do any site seeing so far, but now that I have gotten myself situated I will be venturing out more. Not much happened yesterday, I joined a gym (which is really nice: indoor pool, indoor track, 3 floors of workout equipment, timed circuit system, and a cool personal training device where you stick your keycard in the machine and it tells you what you lifted previously, and how much you should lift today).

This is my car. It has the worst acceleration in the world, but it gets me by! I think I have finally gotten used to entering on the right side, though I always grab to my left for the seat belt (its funny how automatic things become after you've done them thousands of times).



This is a picture of outside my office--nice building for a startup.



Here is the outside of my apartment. All of the housing complexes around here have gates in the front, though I have been told that security guards are not that reliable (in fact, I believe the quote was: "they're either gone half the time or stoned").



Here's my bedroom. Queen sized bed, my own bathroom; I definitely can't complain.



This is the living room. We get ESPN, so I still get my dose of SportsCenter in the morning (late AM in the U.S.).



This is the upstairs loft, though there isn't anything up there except for two long tables.



Here's the kitchen. I've cooked most of my meals so far--South African's are very much carnivores. I couldn't even find chicken at the local Woolworth's (all beef and lamb).

Cyest

I can't believe that today is only Tuesday! It seems like I've been here a week. Yesterday was my first day at Cyest, the startup that I am working for. I had a couple meetings with Andreas Cambitsis, who is one of the co-founders. We discussed the mission of Cyest (perfect creation of technology to build business), what current products are in existence (they are involved in many different businesses, though mining makes up ~60% of their revenue), and what projects they think I might be able to tackle. We have decided to first focus on the pricing of a mining product that they have created--it is a cross between Excel and SQL, but more powerful than Excel and more user friendly than SQL. They had created the product for one of their clients, and now believe that it solves a problem that exists in every mining company. The question is what should the licensing fee be? Currently there exists some competition at $6000 per seat, but most companies are still using Excel for their scheduling/financial modeling.

The company has 75 employees, though not all are on site. It is next to Sandton City, which is a huge shopping mall in Jo'burg. The office building is very nice, though yesterday there was a power outage (not sure if this is a regular occurrence or not). I'll post some pictures of the office, as well as my apartment, sometime this week.

Monday Morning

Talk about an interesting morning! So as some of you might have guessed, people in South Africa drive on the left side of the road (being a former British Colony and all). This was hard enough when I was in Cambridge, and I only had to look the opposite direction when crossing a street. Now I actually have to drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road! :-) So I keep thinking to myself: left, left, left, on right turns stay left. When I come to my first turn, which happens to be a right turn, I naturally look to my left to make sure there are no cars coming. I make sure to pinpoint exactly where I am going to go—left of the median—and start to approach when (can anyone guess what I forgot to do?) a car on the right of me drives by. So I hit the brakes, swear profusely at myself for trying to set a world record in “Least Amount of Time an American Has Taken to Get Into an Accident Driving on the Left-hand Side of the Road” (I literally had been in the car 2 seconds), and continue on my way.

Cyest (the startup I am working for) is located a couple miles away from where I am staying, and is literally only 3 turns from my apartment, so of course I somehow manage to get lost. Which normally wouldn’t be a problem, because I would just: a) stop the car, and b) use google maps to figure out how to get to where I’m going. I don’t have google maps here in South Africa (I don’t even have a phone number yet), but I do have a map, so it should be simple, right? Well, not exactly. Crime prevention hasn’t been a real priority here in Johannesburg (or if it has it hasn’t been very effective), and the first thing I was given to read when I arrived was a manual on how NOT to have your car hijacked. Number one way to prevent being hijacked: you guessed it—don’t stop your car on the side of the road and pull out a map to figure out where you are going (you might as well trade someone directions for your car keys). So is this suburban white boy being a little paranoid? Maybe, but if you read this manual, and then heard that only 1 out of the last 3 GSB people to stay in Johannesburg has had their car broken into while they were in it, then you might feel the same way. So I drive around, and luckily find the main road that I am looking for, and manage to get to Cyest.

And I haven’t even started work yet :-)

First day in South Africa

Well, after 24 hours of traveling from San Francisco to DC to Johannesburg, I have finally arrived in South Africa! The flight over here was actually pretty uneventful; I read Freakonomics on the flight to DC (I had already heard a lot of the stories from the book but figured i should read the whole thing). Upon arriving in DC i discovered that i was assigned a center seat even though i reserved an aisle--this didn't make me too happy but luckily the flight was not full so i found an aisle seat with nobody next to me. I'm not great at sleeping on planes, but i managed to get a couple hours of sleep in between watching Shrek 3, 300, Blades of Glory (which had its moments, but wasn't great--I had a very similar response to Ricky Bobby as well).
Upon arriving in South Africa, the cabbie that picked me up had no idea where we were going, so I got a free one hour unplanned tour of Johannesburg while he kept asking me where it was (I don't he understood that i had no idea, just an email with the address). But eventually we got here--its a pretty nice complex, though the guy with a rifle outside of one of the entrances wasn't exactly reassuring. Tomorrow I'm off to my first day, and I'm sure I'll have more to write about then.