Leaving Silicon Valley

It had to come, I am leaving Silicon Valley today... Checked out the Half Moon Bay Lodge (after a lot of packing, hate it), said good bye and headed towards San Francisco where my last two meetings were supposed to be...

The first one was really accidental... I noticed on Facebook (remember, one of the hottest companies in the Valley) that my friend Roman Stanek, one of the most successful Czech entrepreneurs (and the only "Silicon Valley-like") just came to San Francisco... I first met Roman when he started NetBeans (he sold it 2 years later to Sun Microsystems), actually he was the speaker at the first First Tuesday Prague event which I organized back in 1999... After NetBeans he started another company, focused on web services and SOA, Systinet and sold it 4 years later to Mercury (just before HP bought them).... And also, it is the guy I lended 500 crowns back in 1999 so he could buy drinks at Lavka - so I can be saying that Roman borrowed money from me before he became rich...

Anyway, so when I learned that Roman was in SF, I had to at least see him for a coffee - who knows when will be a good time to meet in Prague, I thought... Well, what turned out during the coffee was that Roman was actually moving over to SF... A bit of a shock before leaving the Bay area... Why should I care...? Well, Roman is one of the few Czechs who's walked that path, made it happen, took an innovation, idea and turned into a business worth a 9-digit figure in dollars... And it would be great having him back home as a role model for the wannabe entrepreneurs, someone who made money, yet from scratch, with no frauds or cheats... We should be able to keep such guys at home, not giving them reasons to go to California... Shame... Well, at least he bought me a latte (BTW most probably the best latte in California - make sure you go there)...

Off to my very last meeting in the Bay area - a guy who I met through Yoav Leitersdorf, his partner in YL Ventures Rob Goldberg... Rob is a very interesting guy, who previously served as a Managing Director of IdeaLab, the famous incubator in Pasadena, CA, and now works with Yoav as well as his own company CrossRoads Ventures... We had a very informal chat about slowing down the investments in this economic environment (which I didn't agree with) and then mostly about his close cooperation with Zynga, one of the most dynamic and successful companies in online social gaming (another one is SNG) - and actually one that my investee Geewa was looking at closely, unfortunately they (unlike Zynga) lost the window of opportunity and their current social networks activities are just me-too... When I learnt Rob worked with Zynga, all I wanted to find out was whether there could be a chance of cooperation or even acquisition... We'll see - let's just say there will be a follow up...

That's it, bye bye San Francisco, you've been very good to me...