How Venture Capital in Silicon Valley works
What impressed me the most in this trip was to find out how the Venture Capital funds in Silicon Valley work. The contrast with what we entrepreneurs in Latin America are used to is gigantic.
Let’s see the main aspects:
Silicon Valley 101
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.
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.
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.
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.
The history of Officenet
A few days ago Martina Rua asked me if I had ever considered writing a book. You know… I had children, I planted a tree, but I don’t know who it was who said that to live a complete life you also have to write a book. It must have been the owner of a Book Publishing company, who even made you plant the trees to get him the paper supply (now with the Kindle will it change to “have a child, make a chip, write a pdf”?).
On the internet no battle is ever lost
I remember several years ago, when Yahoo had emerged as the clear cut winner from the many search engines available early on. Left behind were others such as Altavista, Infoseek and many others. I also remember the day when I read about this new start up called Google, which had just launched another search engine . Yahoo was already publicly traded at the Nasdaq, had tons of money, the best engineers and an extremely high share of all the searches in the planet. At that time I thought: “It’s absurd. No one can challenge the Yahoo supremacy among search engines”.
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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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