Aspire Start Strong+ 2024

Prologue??

It all started 3 months ago, when I got a mail from the Aspire team telling me I’m invited to attend the in-person Start Strong Plus in Seattle. Fast forward 3 months of incessantly checking the scheduling website for visa slots, navigating the bustling streets of Delhi for that crucial visa, last-minute packing, and almost missing flights. Finally, here I was at Gate 21 of the Hyderabad Airport, more than ready to get this started.

We boarded Vistara (in my opinion, the best domestic airline in India) for our first leg to Delhi. After a quick layover where we grabbed some much-needed McD, our journey continued with the main flight:

DEL → EWR via United Airlines.

The 16-hour flight proved to be quite a marathon. Unfortunately, I encountered an issue with my power cords, leaving my device uncharged—a major hiccup. However, a kind-hearted flight attendant came to my rescue, lending me his powerbank which revived my phone just in time. I spent half of the flight sleeping, while the rest was a mix of eating and relaxing. The in-flight meals were a bit hit or miss — the main course tasted like feet (no offense to feet), but the pretzels were surprisingly delightful. Nevertheless, the thrill of international travel kept my spirits high throughout the journey.

Day 1

16 hours later we finally landed in Newark (EWR) airport. This was the first time I set foot in the United States so this 3 hour layover included a lot of picture taking. Navigating terminals via the express train, we arrived at ours just in time to indulge in those iconic breakfast bagels they keep munching on in Suits (spoiler alert: not that great).

Next, it was time for our final stretch to Seattle — a swift 6-hour flight. Between catching up on some anime and stealing a couple of hours of shut-eye, we finally landed at Seattle Tacoma airport. Retrieving our bags, we made our way to the cab pickup, only to be greeted by a blast of chilly air the moment we stepped outside the airport doors which is when we realized how COLD it really is out here.

“We took an Uber to our hotel, the Hyatt at Olive 8, a really cool place conveniently close to the convention center. The moment I checked in, all I could think about was a hot shower. After a 35-hour flight, it was a must. Despite being utterly exhausted, I pushed through to grab dinner.

My colleague Anusha and I had dinner at Chans korean resturant where we discovered these AMAZING chicken wings:

They also had this delicious roasted duck dish with rice and seaweed (yep). You had to roll the rice into a seaweed wrap and eat it which was very cool and Yum. After dinner I went back to my room, trying to unwind. Although I was exhausted, I couldn’t sleep for quite a while and ended up waking up groggy and jet lagged on day 2.

Day 2

This was a Sunday and the only day to really explore the city, so although I was jet lagged I wanted to power through . Seattle has many touristy places like the seattle aquarium, the ferris wheel,etc but the uncontended number 1 was the Space needle. We had bought a pass that allowed us a day and night entry into the Space Needle, so by 9AM we were at the space needle as planned. The ground floor consisted of a mini museum which documented how the needle was built and a *cough* overpriced *cough* gift shop. We made our way up to the space needle through an elevator whose operator does frontflips, (no kidding, he literally front flipped out the elevator doors giving us a jumpscare) to finally reach the top.

When we went up it was raining and it was C O L D out there. (PS - Here’s the taxanomy of how I’m going to refer to how cold it was. cold - meh | COLD - its kinda cold | C O L D - I can’t feel certain parts of me anymore) The view was spectacular and we could see all of Seattle from up there. The rain however played a spoilsport and we couldn’t get the best pictures but here’s one in which I look presentable:

After the space needle we went to the Seattle Aquarium and spent some time looking at the aquatic life in and around Seattle. There was a cool Jelly fish arc reactor thing, some octopus, cool fishes and some ugly spikey coral thingies that I poked for fun.

The Seattle aquarium works on the concept of tide simulation where all the aquariums inside have tidal systems that generate waves in the aquarium at regular intervals. This is to give the fishes an accurate representation of how an actual sea would be and is known to help in keeping the aquariums cleaner.

After this we checked out of our temporary hotel and checked into The Westin Seattle where we stayed for the rest of our Aspire days. This hotel was super close to both the convention centre and the monorail station which made it really easy for us to commute. I also met a lot of other folks in The Westin who were also a part of the Aspire program (to the point where the lobby reception was filled with long lines of us microsofties) which was also very cool.

After checking into the hotel I just slept for a while to shake off the jetlag. After a good dose of un-jetlagging myself, we decided to go back to the space needle to get the city view when its dark. What we did not realise was that the nights here are not as long as they are in India right now. We reached there at around 7PM and found the sky to be BRIGHT as day. We then bing’d the sunset time - which was around 9PM. So we got ourselves some coffee and then waited for sunset. The space needle had a revolving glass floor, one level lower than the main level so we spent some time taking pictures then, until the sun finally set. And my god was it worth the wait - I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

We spent some more time taking pictures and then went down to the gift shop and bought some souvenirs before uber’ing home. We ended up eating our dinner in Westin itself before finally calling it a day and going to sleep.

Day 3

The day 3 is a mondayy and that means its time to get some work done. I had decided to allocate monday to Redmond day so that we can visit The Microsoft Campus. We rose early, packed our essentials, and boarded SoundTransit545 aka the bus that goes to Redmond. We got off at the station close to the campus and then got onto a giant walkway which took us straight into it. It was C O L D that day with temperatures around 10-11 C when we finally reached the campus. We walked around for a while and saw a huge football ground until we entered the commons. The commons was the area where most of the employees would get their food. Since it was around 12PM by then, we decided to eat our lunch. There was a cool concept of eating lunch by the pound, where you could take your pick of food choices and put them all in a bowl. At the end of this we could weigh the bowl and pay based on the weight of the food we chose. After eating our lunch, we went to Building 92 which seemed to be the main building. In there was a campus store, a gaming centre and the famous Microsoft Logo outside the building. We spent some time at the Microsoft Store and looked around at a lot of cool stuff. There was a lot of Minecraft merch (Only for kids unfortunately) and I ended up buying a minecraft tshirt for my little brother, praying it fits him. I also took a cool picture near the minecraft exhibits:

After this, we explored the building even more and went outside to get our cliche picture with the Microsoft Logo:

After snapping a few more photos, we took a stroll around the campus, passing by Studio X and a sleek fitness center. Suddenly, it started raining, forcing us to seek shelter back at building 92. Despite waiting for 15-20 minutes, the rain showed no signs of easing up. We thought we’ll explore the building for a while, but since the rain didn’t seem to be stopping even after waiting a while longer, we made a quick decision to Uber over to Bellevue Square Mall, conveniently nearby, to explore indoors.

At the mall, we spent time browsing and I picked up some items to bring back to India. For an early dinner, I savored some delicious orange chicken at Panda Express.

Once we finished eating, we walked back to the bus station and caught the 595 back to Seattle. Thankfully, the bus stop was just a short 6-minute walk from our hotel — a relief after a long day of walking around. Exhausted, we collapsed into bed, grateful for a comfortable end to a busy day.

Day 4

And now we’re finally at day 3 aka ASPIRE DAY 1. I woke up early, showered, and quickly made myself a coffee before heading to the Seattle Convention Center to kick off Start Strong Plus officially. The Convention centre was a 6 minute walk from our hotel and the Aspire team had placeholders at the entrance to guide us to the event halls.

I made my way to the registration counter where they gave me my ID card. We were divided into 2 tracks, based on the animals, the deer and the orca. I made my way to the hall for the Orca track where we kicked off Day 1 of Start Strong plus. We started with a keynote fireside chat from Charlotte Yarkoni (President of Commerce and Ecosystem). She spoke about her journey into Microsoft and how she really valued accountability and trust. She talked about building accountability and trust as one of the the key values she believed in. She also told us something really important - “managers are not mind readers” and emphasized on how we really need to communicate what we want to our managers to be able to get what we need. We then had an activity in which we were given pieces of paper with values, softwares and skills which we had to map to create the Microsoft code of whats, whys and hows. We needed to map every “what” (software/product) to a “why” (value) and a “how” (skill) which was very insightful.

Next up we had a session on “Future Proofing”. We had an activity lined up for this where we were given a hypothetical scenario.

“Microsoft has ventured into the field of AI-based education and have put out an AI product which is supposed to replace teachers in the field of education. However, this product is failing.”

We were given 15 minutes to find all the possible reasons why this product could fail. We had a huge chart paper on the table and multiple sticky notes and we had to brainstorm all possible problems that can occur and paste them on the chart.

Then, we were asked to grade them on a graph with the X axis being Probability of occurence and Y axis being the Potential impact. The 3 major problems on the top right of the graph (with max probability and impact) were then chosen and wew had to come up with ways to mitigate the risks.

We came up with the major problems to be:

• Biased datasets while training which leads to the AI model not being inclusive.
• Infrastructural Issues while scaling the product.
• The lack of human interaction which is a requirement when teaching children

The rough solutions our team came up with, for these problems were to

• Ensure diversity in the team working on the AI model and sample the data properly so as to maintain inclusivity and diversity. (Not a perfect solution, but a good place to start?)
• Ensure scale testing, and have Plans B,C,D incase of failure.
• No real solution to this, except using this product as a co-pilot to AID the teacher rather than BE the teacher.

We then had a lunch break where I found some of my college friends. We ended up taking a picture with the Aspire logo.

Fun Fact: We were all in the same section back in college

After this we had a session on Unlocking Confidence from Gemma and Stew who were both distinguished trainers for speaking skills. For unlocking our confidence we had to do an activity, which was byfar the most interesting activity in the sessions.

First, we identified our Gremlin. What’s a Gremlin? It’s that inner critic, the voice that tells us we can’t do something whenever we think about it. We gave our Gremlin a name, any name that came to mind, and then we sketched a rough image representing our inner critic.

Next, we wrote down the three worst things our Gremlin tells us when we’re feeling low. These are the harshest criticisms our inner voice throws at us.

Having identified our Gremlin, it was time to confront it. For each negative statement, we crafted a counter statement. For example, if our Gremlin says we’re not good enough at work, our counter statement could be that we’re continually improving and giving our best effort.

We then had 10 minutes to share our counter statements with others at our table, fostering support and understanding.

Now, we write the WORST thing your Gremlin tells you on a piece of paper. Write down your name,contact, Gremlins name and then hold the paper in the air.

Then at the count of 3 - we all crush this piece of paper and throw it across the room while yelling our counter statements. The release of energy with this felt amazing. After throwing our paper ball, we have to collect someone else’s and check-in with them 2 months later on how they are doing with their inner criticism.

With this exercise we came to the end of the day.
I found this exercise to be really powerful as it teaches us a technique to not just deal with inner criticism but attack it.

If you really look at it, by the end of day one we connected with 8 random strangers from different countries, beliefs and values to the point of being vulnerable enough to share our harshest inner criticisms with them. If this does not show the One Microsoft spirit then I don’t know what does.

Day 5

I got ready for Start Strong Day 2 and made my way to the first session and boy was it a strong start. We had a powerful fireside chat with our CFO Amy Hood and CCO Frank Shaw. Amy spoke about her career and how a lot of people expect their careers to be a linear path but more often than not, that is not the case. She told us a story about her real life experiences and about her journey and challenges she faced in her career. She also gave us Homework - which was to watch Satya’s and Kevin’s Keynotes at the recent Build event. Although I couldn’t find Kevin’s keynote online, here’s the youtube link to Satya’s Keynote.

After Amy and Frank’s session, we had previous Aspirers come up on stage and answer questions on how their journey had been and how Aspire helped them to better position themselves for the future.

The next session was called Best Next Chapter and it included a fun activity.

We began by assessing our current satisfaction levels in four key areas: Growth, Relationships, Play, and Wellbeing, using cups on a sheet of paper to represent each. This exercise helped us gauge where we stood in these crucial aspects of life.

Next, we were tasked with planning our near future —specifically the next two years— by setting concrete goals for each area. We were then told to imagine that we had unlimited financial resources, calling this the “status quo” goals. Would your goals remain the same? We had to write down these new goals in another paper.

From these goals, we were asked to pick a few achievable ones for each pillar and create a HOW to achieve every goal. This should be a step by step outline to achieve the goal and must be time bound.

At the end of the session we were given a form to fill out about what we would want to tell our future self. 2 years later - we would get this form back to reflect upon.

A picture of how cool the stage set-up was

Then came the session on Elevating our Vocal Impact led by Gemma and Stew, which proved to be an interactive and lively experience.

The session began with playful exercises focused on exploring the nuances of voice modulation and pitch. We partnered up with random individuals, experimenting with different tones and modulations while engaging in conversation.

One of the highlights was an activity where we formed groups with strangers and created impromptu stories using any three random words (Ours were Izaac, Orange, and Water Bottle). After crafting our stories, we were challenged to enact it and keep improvising by either expanding or shortening our act. We also were told to “sing” our story or “mime” our story to really improve our modulation and non-verbal skills.

In between the sessions, we also had a lot of time to interact with people from different teams, countries, cultures. I met a lot of folks from Israel who were also into Microsoft Security and got to learn a lot more about their culture and way of life.

Our next session, we had our next Keynote Speaker, Cassandra Worthy. She talked about the concept of Change Enthusiasm which is the excitement or eagerness that individuals or groups exhibit towards embracing and implementing change within an organization. It’s a measure of how positively people respond to the prospect of change and their willingness to actively participate in it rather than resist it. She gave us anecdotes from her life where she felt like she had challenges in her work, with her manager or peers and taught us how to exhibit growth mindset and embrace change in our communities.

We (Ritika, Anusha and I) then rushed to our hotels to get changed up and ready to meet a Senior Leader at Defender Experts - Ryan Kivett. Though I felt a bit nervous beforehand, it turned out to be unnecessary. We met at a restaurant within the Westin (He was gracious enough to take time out and come meet us in Seattle) and once he came over we started talking about many different things. We talked about our experience with Aspire so far and the different activities we had gone through. We asked him how he started off his career and he told us about his early days, different teams and projects he worked on. He told us the story of how the Defender Experts service began. We talked a lot about AI and how it has potential to enhance our service greatly. He gave me some great personal advice about higher education and whether its a necessity for me to have a masters degree as I progress in my career. We also talked about our hobbies where I told him about my unhealthy addiction to CounterStrike and he told us how he loved fishing.

We didn’t even realize that we spent nearly 3 hours talking. We took a nice picture by a fireplace nearby before we said goodbye to Ryan:

Again, a big thank you to Ryan for taking the time out to come meet us and sharing his experiences.
Also shout out to Abhishek for connecting us with Ryan so we could have this meet-up. Networking with people is not my strongest suit so having managers who help in growing my professional connections is invaluable.

After he left, we went back to our rooms to prepare for tomorrow, our final day at the event, before finally crashing for the night.

Day 6

The final day of the Aspire Start Strong+ event. The sessions this day started at 10pm which gave us some backup time to sleep in.

The first session of the day was led by Stew and Gemma, focusing on non-verbal communication. They introduced us to the concept of the non-verbal flywheel, which includes actions such as smiling, using hand gestures, and making eye contact to enhance communication effectiveness. They demonstrated the impact of active listening by enacting a scene showing poor listening habits.

After this, they shared steps for practicing good listening skills: acknowledging the speaker through non-verbal cues, avoiding interruptions, maintaining eye contact, and summarizing or reflecting back what was said to demonstrate attentive listening. We were then paired up with someone else to practice these skills firsthand.

The next session was a Fireside Chat with Joe Whittinghill, Priya Darshini and Chris Wells. Chris hosted the chat and asked questions to both Joe and Priya about their journey. They each described how they started off their careers. It was really insightful listening to people who had such a rich set of experiences and challenges that were personally very relatable. Priya also shared some stories on how she transitioned as a manager and the lessons she learnt along the way.

The next and penultimate session was an activity called CODE ME. It was simple, you had 15 minutes to summarize all that we learnt and write a personal code for yourself. We had to write the WHY WHAT and HOW of our existence (dramatic?). This code was our final takeaway from Aspire, something we can adapt into our day to day life to give us perspective and direction.

This brings us to the final session - the surprise guest. A lot of people (me included) thought it would be Satya, however it was someone more magical. The special guest was Oz Pearlman - a well known mentalist who has been on multiple TV shows and placed 3rd on America’s got Talent. We had an hour long session of our minds being blown with some crazy mentalism and mind reading tricks.

With this session, Aspire Start Strong + 2024 officially came to an end. All that was left was the Social, later on that night at the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPoP). We went up to Jason “Jazz” Gray and thanked him for such a great event and took a cool picture with him:

After changing into our evening attire, we hopped on the monorail and headed straight to MoPOP for the social night. The event was extremely well organized, with the entire museum booked out for us.

Inside, they had fascinating exhibits ranging from Batman’s original suit from the 1990s to Jimi Hendrix’s iconic guitars. The atmosphere was lively a DJ, whose playlist also included some bollywood bangers to cater to the Indian folks, and a dance floor where we enjoyed ourselves to the fullest.

They even had a really cool artwork called the Roots and Branches Sculpture which is like an inverted cone made of just musical instruments (mainly guitars):

To add to the fun, we were treated to free drink coupons and snacks, ensuring a memorable night of drinks, dancing, and bonding. It was an evening filled with laughter, new friendships, and unforgettable moments that will stay with me forever.

Day 7

This day turned out to be the highlight of our trip because we had planned to explore Mount Rainier. To make it even better, Mandar, an ex-Microsoftie and one of my onboarding buddies, happened to be in town, so we convinced him to join us for the hike.

Karthik, my college friend who was also attending Aspire, Anusha, Mandar, and I had booked a Mt. Rainier tour on Viator the day before and were all set early in the morning to be picked up.

We climbed into the mini-van and were warmly greeted by our tour guide, Daniel, who had snacks ready for us. He was very friendly and skilled at his job. As we left Seattle and headed towards Mount Rainier, also known as Tahoma, Daniel entertained us with stories about the various places we passed along the way.

Our first stop was at a viewpoint near a church where we could capture stunning pictures of Mt. Rainier.

Our second stop was Christine falls. These were mini-waterfalls and not the coolest imo but we made a quick stop there and took some pics:

We then stopped by at Narada Falls. Now this was a really cool waterfall. The stream was really powerful and we could see a rainbow forming at the base. These falls were extremely beautiful to look at and the water spraying on our faces was really relaxing.

The coolest part about this waterfall was that we could see a rainbow forming at the base of the fall.

Then some more driving later, we finally reached the base of the snow capped Mt Rainier. Daniel had come equipped with snow walking sticks and given each of us one of them. So the four of us started our mini climb up the mountain. We climbed for a while, had a snowball (more like iceball) fight and struggled to remain standing. We took a lot of pictures, here are a few:

By the time we came back down from the mountain, the food places were about to close. We quickly rushed to the visitor centre and got something to eat. I was super hungry and ate pizza slices like a maniac. At this point we(I) were pretty much exhausted and done with the trip. But Daniel had planned one last stop at a nearby rainforest with super long trees.

We walked around the rainforest for a good 40 minutes before finally getting back into the minivan to go back home. The ride back home was quite long and I just crashed for a good hour and a half. Once we reached the hotel lobby, we thanked Daniel for an amazing trip. I just remember going back to my room and sleeping after that.

Day 8

This was the last day at Seattle, I woke up early and went to Pike Market to buy some stuff. Then Anusha called me up and told me that Rangeet and Ketan from her team, were also in Seattle. We went to go meet them near Kirkland where we all shopped for a while. We then went to the Kirkland waterfront which was really beautiful. We ate some ice cream over there - before going back to Seattle for the Argosy harbor cruise. The four of us then went on the one hour guided cruise which had a beautiful view of the skyline.

It was quite late by the time we finished the cruise, so we Uber’d back to our hotel and quickly ate some burgers before finally booking a cab to the airport. We reached the airport well within time and had a lot of free time until we had to board our flight. Thats when I started writing this blog, I’m about 6 hours into the flight rn (The food was better this time) and hopefully the rest of the flight goes without incident :)

Thank You’s

I know this was a long read, but something I learnt from the Aspire event is to document life so that you can look back upon it sometime.
A special thank you to Suresh, Abhishek, Prasad, Shilpi, Ryan, Jason, the Aspire Team and everyone else involved in making this event happen for me.
It was truly an experience I can never forget.
Thanks for reading!
Stay safe and happy.

Note

All views and opinions expressed in this blog are my own!