SVASE

During preparations for the trip a couple of people advised to meet with the SVASE - the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs - www.svase.org, and I was very much looking forward to meeting them and seeing one of their events... I was happy enough that one of SVASE events took place just today evening - First Impressions event... And just before it I also met with the President & CEO, Chris Gill (BTW, British guy who came to the Valley some 15 years ago)...

Interesting stats that Chris gave me was that there are about 400,000 engineers in the Valley, out of which about 20,000 want to be entrepreneurs; there are about 6,000 business plans flying around out of which just 350 received A-round financing last year (and about 1/3 were first-time teams); about 70% of the startup teams come from outside the U.S. (immigrants)...

Time passed quickly, so it was time to go to the First Impressions event... The format was pretty usual - starting with networking, then 10-min presentations by startups (usually looking for funding) followed by a 5-min Q&A with a panel of 3 VCs / Angels... Today the panelists were Joel Yarmom (Draper Associates), Max Shapiro (Keiretsu Forum) and John Cornwell (SandHill Angels)... It was very interesting to see the event - to see how much better Americans are in networking and starting conversation (I was the passive one compared to them), to see how much better we are in logistics... And also, how better they are in presenting their pitches, and how much similarly stupid some ideas for startups are... :-)

And to be frank and open here, I am happy to say that TUESDAY Business Network which I founded and managed for a while back home would do greatly in the Valley...! There are just so many things we are doing similarly to SVASE, and although they are bigger, it is not such a huge (Prague - Valley) difference: they have 11,500 associated members out of which 850 are paying individual members... Yeah, they run about 10 events per month, but most of them take place at sponsor locations and are rather small...

Just to make sure here, I am not trying to be rude or inpolite or even brag about TBN, I am just uncontrollably happy to see that if TBN was here, it would do a great job - and yes, I truly believe it... So congratulations and thanks, Petro, Nikolo, Kristyno, Katko, Daso, Ivane... :-)