First Day in the Valley...

What an exhausting day... but so very interesting and inspiring... I will try to keep this post short, I may come back to some of the things from today later...

Started off quite early, I was supposed to meet my friend George Haber down in Santa Clara where his latest start-up Cresta Technologies is based... Last I saw George in Bucharest, Romania and the main thing that struck me today was how quickly George and his venture are moving ahead, towards what George believes will be a "billion-dollar-company"... Well, it may well be - he was the first one to build a DVD software for PCs and now he aims to build a frequency/region/broadcaster independant receiving chip + software and sees a lot of future in it... Currently raising $ 10 - 12 million, so what was also interesting was to learn about this fundraising in the economic crisis (2 of the VCs he presented to actually asked him for a job)... At the end of our meeting George took me to a fabulous little Thai restaurant which I will just never find again alone (red curry was fabulous)... And on the way I first really enjoyed the spirit of Silicon Valley - we passed office buildings of Yahoo!, Symantec, AMD (pretty empty and quite), Intel... well there were more, but now after the whole day in the Valley I'm starting to be used to it... :-)

My first "real" meeting then was originally supposed to be with Guy Kawasaki - a man I discovered back in 1999 or so when I got to a book How to Drive Your Competition Crazy... Also, Guy was our main inspiration when we with Roman Stanek came up with the BOOTCAMP for Entrepreneurs back in 2000 - at that time I even emailed with Guy to see if we could use the name BOOTCAMP and his opening presentation of Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs (the link goes to an updated version, haven't found the original)... Unfortunately Guy was unavailable (which was announced in advance), so I met with Bill Reichert who is Guy's partner and Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures (previously Garage.com)... But if you want, check Guy's and Bill's presentations - see http://www.garage.com/resources/...

I spent almost 2 hours talking with Bill, and the meeting brought me a lot of interesting insights into the current pace of early stage investing in the Valley and comparison of entrepreneurship in the Valley (and U.S.) and in Europe... Also, Bill brought up pretty interesting case studies of entrepreneurship enforcement in Taiwan (I should ask Sean about this), Singapore and Israel (of course)... Also, to my huge surprise Bill showed me an example (actually two) of very positive governmental regulation leading to (a) improvement of entrepreneurial activity in a market, (b) saving energy which at the end of the day is a win-win to all... I will be thinking about the discussion and might write about this a little later...

After Garage I was invited to an invitation-only dinner hosted by Stanford University and Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale by Burton Lee (professor at Stanford)... The dinner was very interesting, with about 25 people around Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley & Europe (European Entrepreneurship is Burton's interest), including Uli Fricke, Member of the Board of EVCA and Managing Partner of Triangle Venture Capital Group based out of Frankfurt, Germany and Saeed Amidi, Founder and President of Plug and Play Tech Center... I am seeing Saeed on Wednesday morning, so more to come - let's just say for now that meeting Saeed has probably been my most interesting experience so far in the Valley... Plus the food at Plug and Play was excellent - not a big fan of lamb and duck, but the shrimps and salad were terrific...