Silicon Valley’s fault and other shameless comments

Date: Oct 20, 2008 | Author: Santiago B. | Categories: Entrepreneurship

As anticipated in my previous post, last week I made one of the best trips of my life: I went to the Silicon Valley Tour organized by Endeavor.

Although for business or pleasure I have traveled a lot to the United States since I started Officenet, absurdly I had never been to the West Coast. Therefore this was the first time I went to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

In the introduction to the first speaker of the event, Wences Casares, the founder of Patagon, Lemon Bank and BlingNation, began by saying that since he was a bit over 20 years-old he set as a rule to, at least once a year, find an excuse to go there. Then I realized that, being myself an entrepreneur, it is absurd that I’ve waited 37 years to go. Because Silicon Valley is THE mecca of entrepreneurship. It’s where the Major Leagues are played. Where most of the main new innovative companies in the world are built.

What am I going to do now is to write a series of posts trying to share with you the most important ideas and learnings from this trip. In the days ahead I’m going to write about:

- How Silicon Valley looks like

- How Venture Capital firms work there

- What was discussed regarding the global financial crisis we are experiencing and how to take advantage of the difficult context

- The visits we made to Electronic Arts, Ebay, Facebook and Google

- The most interesting business concepts I heard for entrepreneurs

- The Endeavor companies that I did not know me and impresses me the most

But first let’s devote this post to my frivolous, irrelevant and / or fun comments:

- The Silicon Valley’s fault: I, regardless of some differences, am a big admirer of the United States. I was always impressed with how they managed to develop all of this huge country and how they are visionaries and great planners. But I need someone to explain to me how they put the Mecca of Capitalism exactly on top of the San Andreas fault.
Because the city of San Francisco has been there for hundreds of years. At the time of its founding, knowledge about geology and the risks of such a zone were probably very limited. But today it is well known that it is a matter of time before that area is ravaged by a major earthquake. In fact the prediction is that it should have happened already.
Since the emergence of Silicon Valley is much more recent and was gradual, how did they just let it happen there?!
The crisis will take place to the World if some day a major earthquake destroys the central buildings of the majority of the world’s largest companies will make the current crisis appear to be “prosperity”.

- The future of FB: While I will talk in more detail about FB when I refer to the visit, there are two points I want to make now.

On one hand, the company that has caused so much impact in this 2.0 World has just 700 employees! That is the same amount Officenet has!
It seems that this guy Mark Zuckerberg has managed to build a little more value with the same people than us, right? It is estimated that the last valuation of FB was 15 billion dollars. Or a little more than 20 million per employee!
On the other hand, I can already anticipate that this company is going to fail. While I was visiting, most employees were not working at all! Instead, they were all… on Facebook!

- The recipe to ‘fire’ your boss: At one point, at one of the talks someone said that “people join a company but leave their boss”.
If you do not like your boss, here I share with you a formula that was told to me by a Mexican entrepreneur, Fernando Martinez of Vialux to get rid of your boss: a friend of his who was having trouble with his boss, instead of resigning managed to get or put together a CV of his boss. And without his knowledge, sent copies to several of the largest head hunters. Suddenly, the boss started to receive a windfall of ‘headhunters’ calls, got a good offer and left. Isn’t it cool?

- How to drink even the water from the flower vases: There is a very well known saying in Spanish to refer to drunk people .”He/she drunk even the water from the flower vases.” Well, now in the United States that is indeed possible!
After the boom of the Vitamin waters a few years ago, now there’s a new generation of flavored waters. And the brand Hint had no better idea to produce a “Honeydrew Hibiscus” flavor, which smells and tastes precisely like a flower!
I tried it and can tell you that the experience is quite disturbing…

- Respect for minorities in the USA: The number of people with Indian or Asian origin in the US extremely impressive (especially in Silicon Valley). One person told me during the trip that in the states of California, Texas and Florida the American white population is already less than 50%! Fortunately, as this is a country that is very respectful for minorities, it seems that the Indians/Asians treat Americans with respect. They do not discriminate them!
Is it time already to give the minority quotas to the Americans?
Sadly, I saw very few Latin Americans around. And several of them were driving taxis. If we do not improve our education systems, we are destined to be the taxi drivers of the Indian, Chinese or Korean engineers.

- The ‘Charruan’ epic: While on this trip were also people from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, United States, Jordan, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey, the largest delegation of all was from… Uruguay! The smallest country contributed the largest group. I’m sure this has a very profound significance to the future of the World. But I have no idea what it is!

Now that I covered my irrelevant comments, in the next post I will begin discussing the serious stuff.