Adrie's Blog

Silicon Valley

At the start of the decade I spent quite a lot of time in Silicon Valley. This week, I returned for a three day Summit on technology in Palo Alto where E.Factor had the honor to be invited to present itself. It was a special experience to be here at the heart of the area where so much technology has been developed and the large generic social networks were built. And not just be here, but to be invited to speak and to be received with very enthusiastic and favorable reactions such as "Great idea, why has no-one else ever thought of this?". As a result of our presentation, we had a lot of follow up meetings - all valuable and useful to us.

Silicon Valley has an interesting and uncommonly sizeable and impactful Eco System. By having a top university as Stanford, where students of exceptional quality are being prepped for technology careers come together with investors and creative talent from all of the world in a relatively small area - it generates a special energy and dynamics. On Sandhill Road alone there are hundreds of VCs and other investors, on top of that you have the successful entrepreneurs, that stay in this area and continue to invest and advise new young companies and the initiatives like the Plug & Play Tech Centre in Sunnyvale where 250 Tech and Clean Energy companies are housed. This incredible heady mix of Talent, Money, Experience and R&D has a strong impact and dynamic and gives you new energy that feeds you to continue on your path - it even makes the recession recede in your mind as you see the optimism of these young people in combination with experienced serial entrepreneurs like Pat McEntee who takes these young companies under his guard and helps them with his own knowledge to grown real value.

On the other end of the spectrum from start-ups - we visited Cisco and got introduced to their Telepresence project which is an absolute great addition and will help E.Factor fulfill it's vision of allowing entrepreneurs from all over the world to "meet" and connect. The same goes for Vivu.tv - a product that we already took our first steps to add to E.Factor as it is a great collaborative system for easy communication between members and sharing of thoughts, ideas and even events. This is actually another thing I have noticed in Silicon Valley - this type of cell division where people that started out together at Oracle, then found a new company and take new people with them to yet another new venture. This happens with all the large companies here such as Google, Cisco and Microsoft.

The whole energy here is infectious and makes you wonder why governments in combination with cities, universities, investors and serial entrepreneurs elsewhere in the world aren't able to build a mini-Silicon Valley for instance in Germany, the Netherlands, East Coast of the US, Asia or Canada. If you talk about economic support and the small and medium sized businesses being the engine to the new economy - if you speak about the development of Green Tech and Sustainability, then that is the way to go in my mind - it'll be a permanent foundation to the economy of the future.

If you are down about the economy and recession speak...then spend a week in Silicon Valley. It'll cheer you up no end.