Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

Silicon Valley is an incredible place. In this post I will tell a bit what it is like for those who, like me until last week, have never been there or read much about it. Experts can stop here.

Let’s start by saying that Silicon Valley is not a city, but an area South of San Francisco without clear borders and covering many cities such as Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Mountain View and Cupertino.

It started as an industrial park near Stanford University, which acts as its core and main source of talent.

There is no such thing as a ‘downtown’, but the center of Palo Alto and University Drive in particular are the key places. It is all full of highways and traffic is pretty congested. Distances (in miles or minutes) ate large. There are almost no tall skyscrapers, but rather flat Corporate buildings, one after the other.

At Silicon Valley are located the main offices of many of the largest and most innovative companies in the World, such as: HP, Intel, Apple, Google, Ebay, Sun, Oracle, Cisco, Facebook, Yahoo and Electronic Arts.

Also, the offices of the key Venture Capital firms, among others: Kleiner Perkins, Hambrecht & Quist, Redpoint, Draper Fisher, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Sigma, Accel and Bessemer.

What is the secret of its success? The conjunction if talent in Management and Engineering, critical mass of Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital firms, creating an “ecosystem” that makes it the easiest place on Earth to be an entrepreneur.

Por supuesto que la contra es que la competencia es dura…

Foto: alifaan