The Seedlings meet Bill Gates
By The Seedlings (Imagine Cup 2007 UK Final Winners)
Can you Imagine getting an email one day (on the 21st May to be precise) telling you you're off to meet Bill Gates to present your idea? Well, we definitely couldn't... until it arrived! It all sounded so calm, talking about logistics of the event, setting out an itinerary of what was going to happen, etc. It seemed that the person writing the email almost didn't quite understand the excitement that was going to follow!
Needless to say once the initial bout of excitement subsided, the three of us were left quite nervous. We had to put together a presentation for one of the most influential people in the world. It was going to be a tough struggle. Not only that, we had a mere five weeks in which to get everything ready. It was time to get to work.
The first thing we had to do was work out what needed to be done on our application to get it to a demonstratable state. This involved training our fish not to go outside of the tank, adding animations to keep young kids enthralled with the environment and attempting to obliterate as many bugs as possible (For more details on what our application does, go visit our blog).
Then came the complicated bit; we had a two minute speech to prepare that wasn’t allowed to overrun, had to say everything we wanted it to, and had to be sharp, punchy, and most of all memorable. We didn’t want to fly over 4000 miles to stand there speechless (no pun intended)! All in all, it took us about six hours to write our two minute speech. We pored over the wording so many times in order to make it understandable to those outside of the UK, added some facts and statistics for effect and we ensured that what we'd written sounded passionate and genuine. Believing in your idea is important and this comes across not only in the delivery of your speech but also in the content.
Finally the trip was upon us! We all arrived at Terminal 4 of Heathrow airport ready to board the plane...or so we thought. Jim and I managed to check in automatically without any problems. The same couldn't be said however for poor Matt. The spelling was incorrect on his ticket and this caused the automatic check-in machine to give up and refer us to a real person. We bounced around the terminal a bit before eventually boarding our only partially delayed 9.5 hour flight to Seattle.
Landing in Seattle sometime mid afternoon, we blearily made the trek to Redmond. After getting a little lost in the taxi (there's a lot of buildings on Microsoft Campus), we eventually made it to Microsoft Studios. We were treated to various Pizza's and soft drinks (as you'd expect from the world's largest software company) and it wasn't long before introductions were being made and people were excitedly telling us what was going to happen over the next 24 hours. After that, we headed back to the hotel where the team decided to head to the pool before doing some more practice on our presentation and getting a (relatively) early night.
Up bright and early Tuesday morning, we were ready to head back to Microsoft Studios and prepare our stall for the momentous presentation. Finally, the time was upon us. We stood ready by our stall; all three of us on edge, feeling excited yet scared at the same time. The Korean team went before us with hardware used for communicating with people who were both deaf and blind. Then it was our turn. We shook Bill Gates' and Craig Mundie's hands as they walked up to us and they made a joke about there being two of us called Mat(t) on the team. We delivered our pitch perfectly...thereabouts! Jim kicked off with the introduction, handed over to me to do our demo, and then Matt wrapped it all up at the end. There were a couple of minor hiccups with the fish misbehaving here and there but aside from that Bill and Craig looked really impressed. They asked us some relevant and quite technical questions after our presentation and we believe we got them thinking about our idea.
After they walked away, we retired into the room where all the soft drinks were kept and watched everybody else's presentations on the big screen. It slowly started to sink in who we'd just spoken to and the three of us sat there quite proud of what we'd just achieved.
The rest of the day was still very good even with such a tough act to follow. We were treated to a talk from Anders Hejlsberg of C# fame (and Delphi/TurboPascal fame before that) and had the opportunity to ask him technical questions as well as how he got to where he is, what he enjoys doing etc. We also spoke to a few guys from the CLR team and chatted about our system architecture.
All in all, the entire experience was well worth doing. Rumour has it they may be able to get Bill at the next Imagine Cup, so it could be you going out there this time next year! What are you waiting for? https://www.imaginecup.co.uk