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

Even when it was not the central purpose of the Endeavor trip to Silicon Valley, given the difficult times we live in the issue of the financial crisis arised in almost all talks.

Here is a summary of the most interesting things that were said and my personal view on that subject, from the charming beach of Barracas, on the banks of the Riachuelo (a fetid river two blocks from my Buenos Aires office).

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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:

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When the goal is to promote the economic growth of a country there is abundant research that shows that very few factors weigh as heavily as the birth of new businesses founded by entrepreneurs.

That is why in the last 10 years I worked with Endeavor to promote entrepreneurship and that way improve the Economy of my country.

Recently we have been having a debate inside Endeavor that I would like to share with you to promote a discussion.

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Yesterday I came back from two days in Montevideo for the Endeavor Uruguay Conference and Gala Dinner.

I have a special feeling for Uruguay and its people, but beyond my “favoritism” I returned tremendously impressed.

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After a little over two weeks of launching this blog, the biggest surprise is the amount of visits I am gettingto the English version from South Africa, ranking #3 behind expectables Argentina and the US.

Probably, the help I got from Greg Durst from Endeavor South Africa and this post by Fred Roed have a lot to do with it.

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In this week’s edition of The Economist in the Business section they
published a full article about Endeavor!

For those who don’t know about it, Endeavor is a Foundation created by
Linda Rottenberg and Peter Kellner that helps entrepreneurs in emerging markets around the World.

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