I’m sitting in SFO with a few hours to kill. A little while ago, I concluded the last gig on my San Francisco tour for The Visual Organization. By all accounts, it was a very 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 swag.
- 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.
- 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:
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Yeah, I worked Katy Perry in to the Netflix talk.
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Speaking at Autodesk about The Visual Organization: San Fran
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Autodesk talk
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Speaking at Trifacta
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Keynoting Collabworks conference in San Francisco
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Carnegie Mellon SV Campus
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Books at Platfora
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Talking with Platfora VP Pete Shlampp.
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Hotel door sign. Nice.
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Tech Selfie at Netflix HQ
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3D printer at Autodesk
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Output from Autodesk 3D printer
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Netflix HQ Lobby
To watch the Netflix talk, click below:
This was an unexpected highlight:
Click image to embiggen it.
Finally, thank you to all of the companies and people who helped make the tour happen.

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