Uruguay | Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward

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

- 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: