Highlights from The Visual Organization Book Tour

I’m sitting in SFO waiting for my flight to arrive. I have just concluded my San Francisco tour for The Visual Organization. By all accounts, it was a successful four days. All in all, I gave nine talks at the following places:

Autodesk – I saw my first 3D printer in person and generally speaking geeked out on the second floor. What amazing designs!
Netflix – Two words: Tech Emmy. See selfie in slideshow below. The hosts also gave me some very cool schwag. 
Tableau –  Right before speaking, I received without question the best news of the tour: Tableau purchased quite a few books. It was the second largest order of books of my writing career. Bulk sales rule.
eBay – Before going on, I was able to speak to some folks making the magic happen at eBay. Theory is fine, but being able to learn from people putting ideas into practice never disappoints.
Visier – An interesting Q&A on Big Data and the need for HR to adapt to changing times.
CMU Silicon Valley Campus – Fantastic campus and very smart cookies. I like to say that if you’re the smartest one in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
CollabWorks – By this point, I was really warmed up. This might have been my best talk of the tour.  I finally met CMU alumni Terri Griffith and Andrew Karpie in person.
Trifacta – Excellent new digs. We set some type of record for number of Apple doohickeys required to make a presentation work.
Platfora – Fantastic Q&A and a slew of copies of the book to sign. Very hip workplace with amazing data visualizations on the walls. While most startups sport the obligatory ping pong table, Platfora one-ups them with an actual gong.

Data

Here are a few numbers from the tour:

Total events: 9
Lectures: 7
Interviews: 2
Books signed: 132
Number of talks in which I mentioned Breaking Bad: 7
Tomatoes thrown: 0 (always a good sign)

Misc.

I also got to meet up with Datahero founder Chris Neumann for drinks and an interesting talk about, well, data stuff. Finally, my hotel sported a #Rush door sign (see slideshow). I, er, borrowed that for home.

Here are some pics:

Click to view slideshow.

To watch the Netflix talk, click below:

Finally, thank you to all of the companies and people who helped make the tour happen.

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