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I just finished a week down in San Francisco, trying to come up to speed on the Salesforce.com Foundation and what I’ll be doing here. I had four main goals in coming down:

• Meet my new co-workers face to face (the ones in HQ, anyway)
• Get a better read on the culture of the Foundation–that’s hard to do remotely
• Spend time with Steve Wright working through what my main areas of focus should be
• Connect with folks at Salesforce.com the company and learn how best to leverage their knowledge and systems in serving nonprofits

I felt like my trip was a great success in all of those categories. I have great co-workers and it was so nice to spend time with them in meetings, at happy hour, etc. It was really cool to connect with some great people at the Company. The Foundation is a small nonprofit, but we’re connected to this massive software company.

I’ll be at the Foundation filling all sorts of roles that have whole teams at the Company–product management, sales engineering, internal process work, partner support. I’ve already gotten great tips and suggestions from Company employees about how best to get this work done. It’s really exciting.

So I’m feeling good, if overwhelmed. Starting a new job is always a lot to absorb. It’s a bit daunting hearing how the Product Management team gathers requirements, interfaces with developers, and tracks progress, and then realize that I’ll be doing all that by myself! Setting expectations of what we can get done will be key…