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This post is a quick summary of our trip to Silicon Valley which started in late October 2010 when we hopped on a plane in Helsinki and arrived to San Francisco after 20h of drinking free refreshments, watching bad movies and eating miniature meals. On the way over the Atlantic the guy next to me was playing Angry Birds on his iPad for hours, go Finnish startups! After arriving we dragged our jet lagged souls to Union Square and grabbed some Italian after hitting the beds.
On Saturday, the third day of our trip we went to the first conference: BizTechDay. This was the first major event in our trip shedule. Here are some free notes I scribbled down during the event that was held at the Metreon in downtown San Francisco.
Jan Bosch (Intuit Innovation), Bob Upham (Yahoo!), Bob Meese (Google Business Development): When roadmaps of large companies and startups match magic happens, find those.
Jessica Jackley (Kiva, Profounder): Entrepreneurship is about building a better tomorrow. Giving a loan is also about giving attentio
Naval Ravikant (VentureHacks, Angle.co): Small exits create small angels. Doing angle investments: Be picky, join the heard, brand yourself, be humble, stick to standard terms, shun power. Most startups fail because disputes inside teams.
Gautam Godhwani (Simply Hired): Jobs: My #1 job is to make sure that the top 100 people at Apple are A+ players, when that is done everything else takes care of itself.
Fabio Rosati (Elance): 30% of the workforce are going to be independent workers. Work is going online: the human cloud.
Next day, Sunday, was relocation day. After checking out from the hotel we got a rental and toured around the rainy and foggy San Francisco. After driving down Lombard street we hit the 101 and headed to Palo Alto. We had no problems finding our new hotel. Later in the evening we had the kickoff dinner at Fishmarket with the Aaltoes and Boost guys.
On Monday we headed to Japan town where FailCon was rolling on full speed. The most memorable speakers at FailCon wheree probably Scoble, Pouge, Adelsson and Buchheit. Here are my notes on the most interesting topics:
Navigating a successful exit: The moment distrust enters negotianions, deals start to unravel. Distrust leads to more mistrust and finally there’s a total tailspin.
On Tuesday we had an early morning breakfast at the Stanford campus with Peter Vesterbacka from Angry Birds and Chris McCann from StartupsDigest. Great to meet Chris finally, he’s doing such a good job at StartupDigest. Rumour says that we’ll have a StartupDigest list in Helsinki, soon. Later at noon we headed to Yahoo. Wednesday was also spent on the Stanford campus where we met a a couple of VCs.
Friday was the last big day for us, the grande finale. We visited Startup Waffles, Dogpatch Labs, Kicklabs, Venture I/O and GitHub. We met tons of startup people and had a blast despite the tight schedule. One wierd aspect of San Francisco was that 1) Almost all the places we visited had a dog 2) There were lost dogs/cats signs up everywhere. Is it just me or doesn’t this seem a bit fishy? Well anyhow, the grande finale. The good folks at PariSoma had let us organize a Finnish Night at their place in the evening. It was great to see such a bunch pack up into PariSoma that night. We all had a blast!
We took a laid back day after the run around day yesterday and a transatlantic pressuchamber hour in front of us. Visited the Stanford campus and in the evening Mårten Mickos was kind enough to treat us with a dinner, sauna and pool. Halloween and Go Giants were the topics of the town that day.
