Roadtrip across America

Wow! It’s been a busy month of April!

I wrote a while ago that we wanted to go on a road trip to meet our users and customers. Well guess what? We did it!

We landed in New York City early April, in the evening, took the City’s very efficient public transportation system to the fashion district in Manhattan, and spent the night in a nice hotel after blowing our entire recent round of financing on a meal. For three of us, it was our first time in New York so we did a little sight-seeing, including Central Park and the beautifully architected Apple Store which was designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, and the Guggenheim museum which has a jaw-dropping collection of modern art ranging from Kandinsky to Braque. After New York we visited Boston, with it’s Harvard and MIT campuses (if you’re a fan of Frank Gehry‘s work, check out MIT’s Stata Center), then headed towards Washington DC.

We met clients in each of of these cities, and learned quite a lot from our discussion with them, but even more from observing them use Scalr. I can now say that user testing rocks! We’ll have a separate post on this later; meanwhile, here are a few pictures we took along the way:

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

Road Trip

After Washington DC, we set our GPS destination to Miami, with a waypoint in Atlanta to meet a client there. It was a rather long drive, and we only stopped for food and gas. It wasn’t as much fun as we hoped it would be, so we kept it interesting by brainstorming new ideas to make Scalr the best tool for scaling web applications (and when we got bored of that we talked about movies, technology, and sometimes cultural differences between the countries we’ve lived in). We didn’t stay long in Atlanta – perhaps all of 2 hours – then continued to drive down to Florida, where we didn’t stay much either.

After meeting with a long-time customer there, we proceeded to the longest drive I’ve ever done: Miami to San Francisco, going through Dallas, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas. We took shifts driving and sleeping, but even with that it was very tiring. We didn’t have any meetings with clients along the way, so we wanted to get to the other coast as soon as possible. An evening was spent in Dallas, where we unanimously voted to go to a steakhouse (the Silver Fox, it was awesome), before driving through the night to Santa Fe (arrived in the morning). I have to add here that Santa Fe is a beautiful city, and we spent half a day there visiting the art galleries on Canyon road.

We then drove to the Grand Canyon, where we took these beautiful pictures from Antelope Canyon, then drove to Las Vegas (stayed at the Bellagio!), and finally Los Angeles and San Francisco…

… For a total of 5300 miles driven in 10 days. Let me say that after that, when we closed our eyes, we could still see things coming at us!

That’s the story of our roadtrip! Now if you want to know what we learned from the trip, check out Roadtrip: Collecting Feedback.