Silicon Valley’s fault and other shameless comments
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
- 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:
Visiting Silicon Valley
At this moment I am for the first time in my life at Silicon Valley, in a tour organized by Endeavor. It is very difficult to tell you in the 10 minutes I have right now the unbelievable experience this is. It will take many posts to digest what I am seeing and learning in this trip.
The agenda starts every day at 7:20AM and goes non stop until 10PM at night. Yesterday we visited Electronic Arts, the largest videogame company in the World. My digital camera did not work, but I took a few pics with my cell phone. The quality is very poor (damned Blackberry 
) but for whoever wants to take a look, I ulploaded them to Facebook.
The love of technology: long live the Blackberries
In the World today there are two classes of people: those who love technology and those who reject it. There is no middle ground.
I clearly belong in the first group and therefore I cannot understand those who call being in an area without email and internet coverage “rest”. That is my definition of “stress”! To the lover of technology there is no bigger feeling of peace of mind than an empty Inbox for being up-to-date. That is why the Blackberry (or iPhone) is our best friend!
The sport of the future
Almost every person I know complains about having a too sedentary life and not having enough time for practicing sports. Here I bring you an idea that solves this issue: A sport that can be practiced anywhere, without any accessories, with very simple rules and that can be played by two or more players.
This is the story:
We geeks have a sense of humour too (but no one gets what we are laughing about)
Last week at Harvard University they announced the 2008 Ig Nobel Awards, an interesting version of the Nobel Prizes to recognize research where the funny subject “first makes you laugh, then makes you think”, organized by the journal ‘Annals of Improbable Research’.
The name comes from a pun with the word “ignoble” but there is nothing ignoble about the winners! I would say they are shameless geniuses.
As an example, two of last year’s winners: in Medicine it was won by two scientists who wrote a paper on: “Sword swallowing and its side effects”. You can see above the pic of the moment when they accepted the award.
The Peace award was given to a US Air Force Lab that researched to develop a chemical weapon nicknamed “the gay bomb” because it makes the enemy soldiers feel sexually irresistible to each other.
Let’s see some of this year’s winners, and then I will propose a contest:
Into the dark clouds
This is the fourth and last post on the series about paragliding and Entrepreneurship. On the three previous ones we covered the topics of preparing to startup, the startup phase itself and the growth period. Now it is time to discuss about how to deal with adversity.
A while after the pleasant flight of the previous post, large clouds started covering the horizon. As if Nature wanted to help me write this blog, it was a perfect metaphor of how in countries like Argentina, right when things start going well you get a storm threatening to cut your wings.
The soundtrack of our lives
The Bilinkis Top 20 is back with the 20 most popular songs for October. There is a new song at the top. And it made me remember that many times I thought if I had to choose only one artist to be the soundtrack of my life, it would be The Smiths/Morrissey.
What artist would be the soundtrack of yours?
Now, on to the rankings!
Flying High
The sensation of flying, even at low altitude, is like anything else. But the true challenge (and pleasure) is to be able to fly high.
The next morning after my first take-off, we went to a much higher mountain. It was no longer time for preparation or test take-offs: the time had come to really fly.
Taking off
Along the lines of comparing the learnings from paragliding with becoming an Entrepreneur, the first post covered the stage of preparation. Now is the time to focus on the start-up phase. And as Wes Harman, the author of this photo, graciously reminds us, no start-up is ever the first or last to die!
So back to Tucuman and my paragliding course. After two hours of suffering and being blown by the wind on the flat, the instructor said it was time to move on to the next stage: the first take off. We moved to a different location, where we could walk up a hill about 100 feet high. Naive, I asked: “We are going to fly in tandem, right?”. The professor laughed. With only two hours of practice, it was time for my first flight alone.
Learning to fly
Very few things in my life took me out of my comfort zone so much as when a few years back I traveled with a group of friends to learn to fly a paraglider. Trips with my friends are chosen by voting, and, needless to say, that year I lost.
So I travelled to Tafí del Valle in Tucuman, Argentina, pretty scared, but determined to start the course, which I knew started on a totally flat place. I thought the next step was to fly in tandem with a professor and that I was willing to try. Then when the time came to fly on my own, I would see what I did.
The experience was very interesting and what I will do now is write a series of four posts connecting what I lived while learning to fly with the stages of founding and starting up a company.
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Riesgo & Risk & Reward is Santiago Bilinkis' blog. Santiago is a serial entrepreneur, who created this blog to ignite a discussion and share his experiences, thoughts and anecdotes.
The main subject will be Entrepreneurship, but he plans to cover a broad range of topics. The common ground will be Risk. Welcome to this adventure!
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