Silicon revolution

Talpha Everette, a junior from Wilmington, stood at the front of the private tour bus navigating early Monday morning commuter traffic on the highway from Palo Alto to San Francisco. Swaying slightly, she bent over her smartphone, reading notes from the screen aloud to her classmates. The first stop on the class’s jam-packed itinerary was AdRoll, and Everette’s assignment was to brief her fellow students on the company and the Carolina alumnus they were going to meet there, Sam Trachtenberg.

“Sam worked at Dolby, Ebay and Expressworks International before taking on the roll of senior director of operations at AdRoll,” she began. “AdRoll was founded in 2007, with a mission to ‘collect, analyze and act on customer data to deliver high performance marketing campaigns.’”

When the bus arrived in the industrial neighborhood that was AdRoll’s home, the students entered the building and followed an employee past the pinball- and pingpong-equipped common room, a break room stocked with snacks, coffee and white wine on tap and a gallery featuring portraits of the startup’s six “spirit animals.”

In the conference room, a grinning Trachtenberg greeted the students with a recording of the Tar Heel fight song, holding high his souvenir confetti from the 2017 men’s basketball championship.

Welcome to Silicon Valley.

“The building is everything I imagined a Silicon Valley startup HQ to look like and more,” wrote Eric Li, a junior from Charlotte with a computer science major, on the class’s online forum page. “The culture, games, setup and people looked like [something] out of a TV show.”

The whirlwind California tour that was the highlight of the Maymester course called Silicon Revolution had launched. Like Silicon Valley itself, though, the seeming serendipity of the class had actually been years in the making.

‘This doesn’t happen overnight’

History professor James Leloudis came up with the idea for the Silicon Revolution class several years ago.

In the course of his development duties as associate dean for Honors Carolina and director of the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence, Leloudis connected with a vast and growing network of successful Carolina alumni in northern California.

“This doesn’t happen overnight,” he told students several times, describing how he often called on acquaintances from years past to form new bonds, reconnecting with alumni as they moved from one company to the next.

Leloudis set out to design a course that would allow some of the University’s best and brightest students to connect to this network, hearing from their own lips about the zigzagging and circuitous routes that led them there. 

At the same time, they would learn – through books, articles and writing assignments – the history of Silicon Valley and its importance as what he described as “the epicenter of a new knowledge economy.” And they would do all this in the compressed three-week schedule
of Maymester.

Read more of this story at the University Gazette.