By god, this has got to be the best desserts I’ve ever had at AddThis. We had La Madeleine today, and the desserts were just insanely good. I ate way too many of them…
Damn, my diet just went out the door. I’m going to have hit the gym tonight. Seriously.
To wrap up our 2013 kick off meetings, we hosted a casino night for all the AddThis employees in our new Virginia office.
It was awesome to see the space used for so many purposes. It was also very nice to see our team from around the country come together to celebrate and socialize.
Casino night was composed of an open bar with two bartenders, tons of food, poker, black jack, roulette, craps, a live dj, raffle prizes, and more.
Just to be clear, there was no real money involved. ^_^
I can easily say that it was one of the coolest events we’ve ever had. Everyone dressed up, and it was a phenomenal time.
Rumor has it that there was an after party. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep up, so I had to bounce earlier. I don’t have any photos, but I heard it was a good time.
Thanks to Carol, Bhavna and Robert for coordinating the whole event. I’m looking forward to future events!
Wow, what an intense few days of meetings, lighting talks, etc. It’s good to sync the entire team once a while though. It’s fascinating to hear about all the business opportunities from our team around the world. 2013 feels like it’s going to be a really good year.
This year, I had Andy was a big part of helping me shoot the photos. He rented the gear and helped set everything up for shooting over a hundred portraits. Keep in mind, we had to shoot the photos and set everything up during our lunch break. I’m always impressed how versatile and passionate our team is. Shooting photos wasn’t in his job description, but it’s great seeing him flex his creative skills.
Here are some of the photos. (If you want me to remove your photo, just let me know. I don’t get that much traffic to my blog, but I can swap your photo with someone else’s if you don’t want it public)
Now I’ve got the itch to get a new lens! I’d really love to get my hands on a 70-200mm 2.8.
We had a great kick off meeting. It’s pretty wild how many people are in the company now. There are so many faces that I don’t recognize.
As part of getting to know everyone, I’ve taken pictures of all the employees again this year (with the help of Andy). I’m hoping to show off some of those photos soon.
Today we had a pretty long day of meetings. It’s good to see all the execs formulate a plan and internalize a lot of the things we talked about last year.
After our day long meetings, we went to play laser tag. I did decent, considering it was my first time. My highest score was in capture the flag. I scored 3rd place with a hit ratio of 93.94%. So here are some quick tips for laser tag: 1) bring in an extra set of cloths b/c you’ll sweat, 2) come up with a funny handle, 3) don’t bother camping—just walk around and shoot people.
We had an office party at the Continental last night. It was good to see most of our team there. The food was delightfully good. Unfortunately, Annie and I didn’t get there until 8:15pm. The traffic on 66E yesterday looked horrible on google maps.
It’s nice to get away from the office, but man, it can be a quite a trip getting in and out of McLean VA around the holidays. My recommendation would be to have the office parties in the office… and bring all the toys/games to us.
That being said, I’m still totally bummed out that we don’t have a ping pong table yet. x_X
Most of the plants are doing well since our hackathon. It seems that the spider plants, basil, peppers, and generic indoor plants are doing really well. The bonsai, however, haven’t been able to adapt.
Here’s a photo of the blue bells we’ve grown from seed.
Here’s a wide angle of all the plants. We’ll begin distributing them to the team soon.
