Silicon Valley in 72 Hours
I'd never been to the Valley before. The startup I co-founded, Heyo, is currently based in Blacksburg, VA, but is planning to move out there in May. The goal of this trip was to get to know the area a bit and try to meet some folks. Armed with Paul Graham's Where to See Silicon Valley and Garry Tan's guide to where to startup your startup, I meticulously planned my 3-day west coast trip while sitting on the tarmac, waiting for the plane to de-ice in Roanoke. Here are some notable people, places, and events that made the trip awesome.Stayed with an airbnb Co-founder
The random airbnb place in Palo Alto I got Tuesday night was the apartment of one of the 3 founders of airbnb and his wife. I won't mention his name or the place (because they don't mention it in the listing), but he and his wife were wonderful, and we talked Stanford and startups over dinner before he gave me a ride to an event that I didn't really have a plan on how to get to. Incredible first experience in the Valley.Deepak Kamra, Christine Herron, Rudy Garza, Mark Suster, Joel Yarmon
This was Larry Chiang's Reverse VC Panel. There were probably only 25 total attendees, and the topic was "How to get a VC to mentor you". Anthony Ha and Amy Saper did a great job of keeping it moving. A couple points that stuck with me here:
- Christine Herron noted how tough it is for women to find mentors, because of how inappropriate it would have been for her to regularly spend time with an older male mentor.
- They also noted a distinct difference between being contacted by a student for help/advice vs. someone out of school. Take note here, students: when you contact powerful people, they feel good helping you out while you still have a clean slate. Once you define yourself, either with a job or a startup, you're in a different world. Take advantage (see notes on Cory Levy below).
- There seems to be an incredible contradiction about a profession where to be successful you have to meet with as many smart people, working on world-changing things, as possible, but the whole time you're looking for a reason to tell them "no".Peter Theil (at NextGen Conference)
Peter is a very smart dude. A few notes I made from his talk include:
- He likes to invest in companies with a complex technology and complex sales process. He specifically mentioned SpaceX, and how building rockets and selling them to the federal government is pretty much as complex as it gets.
- Starting a big company is no less risky than starting a small company, so take big investment and shoot for the moon. He said they like to invest in companies that will never exit otherwise.
- He also talked about how silly it is to try to start a company in consumer internet or mobile right now, because it's incredibly crowded. Oops.Mark Suster (again)
Mark's talk was on mistakes he made and what can be learned from them. I follow Mark's blog and he reiterated a lot of points he discusses there, so I didn't have a ton of take-aways here. I definitely love hearing a 15-minute recap of the life of an entire company, especially from the times of the dot-com bust. Tons to learn about the mentality of the industry there. Mark's subtle humor and self-deprecation also make him a pretty likable guy.Keith Rabios
Keith has the intelligent, confident, but casual demeanor of a tech executive. I can see what makes people want to follow him. The thing that impressed me about Keith is that he is still in an operational role at a startup after all his success. That's passion.Cory Levy
Cory is notable because he is a freshman in college in Texas and put together the NextGen Conference where the previous three speakers spoke. Awesome conference, Cory. You're money.Founder's Den
At NextGen and for the rest of the trip, I was joined by an investor/advisor of ours at Heyo, Bill Boebel, who built a company and sold it to Rackspace a few years ago. Bill and I headed up to the city (apparently even people who live in San Jose are referring to San Francisco when they say "the city") after NextGen for a meeting with Jason Johnson and Jonathan Abrams at the new Founders Den. I doubt this post will hit their Google Alert because they just opened a few days ago and had Forbes (among other publications) in there interviewing them the same day we were there. Their idea is to fill their space with about half experienced (2nd-time +) entrepreneurs, and half first-timers, about 10 companies total. It was definitely an incredibly experienced group that they have put together there, and a beautiful space.Twitter HQ
A couple blocks up from Founders Den is Twitter's HQ. A friend of Bill’s from Rackspace who recently left for Twitter to work on Cassandra big-data applications, was still at work and brought us up to the Twitter offices to take a look around. It doesn't seem that long ago that nobody outside of the Valley took Twitter seriously. Being in this awesome office with hundreds of engineers was very cool - some kind of odd proof for me that going for a big world-changing idea that people will mock as a real business really can "work out". It was 7pm on a Thursday and there was still a lot of activity at Twitter... their legal team was even having a mini happy hour.Awesome View of the City
On the way to dinner, Bill accidentally put us on the Bay Bridge. (We turned around on Treasure Island.) On the way back we had the most incredible view of San Francisco I'd ever seen, with the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop to the newly lit city in the early evening. If you've never been to SF, I recommend accidentally taking the Bay Bridge.Peruvian, Margharitas, Racer 5, and Bikers
Wednesday night we went out in San Francisco with some friends. It was a damn fun night, with one of the highlights being randomly running into Alex Polvi and a friend at Zeitgeist at 12:30am having grilled cheese sandwiches. Alex's company, Cloudkick, was recently acquired by Rackspace, and interestingly Alex knew all about me and Heyo, having reviewed our YC application in the Fall (we weren't accepted). That makes him one of probably five people in California who knew what Heyo was back in early November before we released our initial apps.Citizen Space
Thursday morning, after a slow start and driving around the city a bit in the morning (including the squiggly road), I checked out a few coworking spaces around the city while Bill was in meetings all day. First was Citizen Space, which has a great location on 2nd street. Apparently this was the first space of its kind in the city when it got started (2006?). I like that it's not expensive and not-for-profit, and the folks I talked to there were very down-to-Earth. Very quiet and casual.Pier 38
Everyone we spoke to about coworking spaces in the city mentioned Pier 38 as an awesome place to work. Part of the space is Polaris Ventures/Dogpatch Labs, and the rest is managed separately. I hadn't had any luck with getting in touch with a Dogpatch person, and couldn't find any other contact info regarding the space, so I just dropped in. After getting a bit of work done in the cafe area, I got to chat with Ken Thom, the manager of the space. Ken is the nicest guy I've ever met, and the space is amazing. Beautifully furnished, awesome location, awesome views, and startups we read about everyday housed there.SOMAcentral
SOMAcentral had been recommended to me, but I couldn't find anything about it online. Ken manages this space as well though, and it worked out that he was able to show me around this space too (it is a few blocks away from Pier 38). This space was much more officey and less open than Pier 38, but had some amazing companies and some offices with excellent views of the city. Thanks, Ken!pariSoma
If Pier 38 and SOMAcentral had a classy, professional-but-still-startup feel, pariSoma felt much younger and scrappier. It's a few blocks away in a different part of town than the others I went to (North part of The Mission), and definitely felt a bit more indie. I think the major difference is that Pier 38 and SOMAcentral had mostly angel- and venture-funded startups, while pariSoma probably had mostly seed-funded and bootstrapped startups. They're moving into a much larger new space in a few weeks (right around the corner from the current space) as well.Facebook House/HQ
Thursday afternoon we headed back down towards Palo Alto, this time taking I-280 instead of the 101. Good call, Paul. We took the Sand Hill Road exit, and Bill pointed out all the big VC firms, though the buildings are all incredibly nondescript. Bill had found the address to the original Facebook house somewhere online, and as we weaved through some neighborhoods to avoid traffic, we kind of stumbled upon Facebook Headquarters, which seems to be in a very residential part of Palo Alto. When we finally came across the Facebook House, it was predictably unremarkable, though I will say I was disappointed that I couldn't even find it as a location on Facebook Places. (Sorry to whoever actually lives there, it probably gets old having cars creep slowly by while trying to perform a check-in.)500 Startups
Thursday evening was the 500 Startups/Startup2Startup holiday party at the new 500 Startups incubator space off Castro Street (in Mountain View). Bill is a mentor and LP in the fund, and this was the grand opening of the new space (guessing that's why it was a holiday party in January). So, Dave McClure knows how to throw a party, or at least how to budget for one. Amazing food, top shelf open bar, a pirate doing magic tricks, and a photo booth with pirate paraphernalia were the highlights. It also seemed like every venture fund sent somebody along (met Bill’s friend Yujin at Andreessen Horowitz), as well as all the major tech blogs (even Scoble). It was my first SV party, so I have no idea if that is the norm or exception for seed-stage incubator parties, but it was quite the experience.Breakfast at Joanie's off California Av.
I wouldn't necessarily mention this as noteworthy (though the breakfast crepe with smoked apple sausage at Joanie's was phenomenal), but after seeing so many "celebrities" of the valley in the previous couple of days, I'd be remiss to not mention this experience: After a delightful breakfast with a friend who is a hardware engineer at Apple, I found myself face-to-face with Paul Graham while walking out of the restaurant. I stammered the wittiest thing I could conjure ("Hey, Paul Graham!"), which I think made us both instantly uncomfortable, and I slinked away. Sorry, pg.Plug and Play Labs
After a few minutes of downtime in a coffee shop on University Avenue, we had a late-morning appointment at Plug and Play down in Sunnyvale. I was supposed to give a two-minute pitch to a group of "Executives in Residence", though didn't realize I needed an accompanying slide deck (for a two-minute presentation) until we arrived and everyone else had one. I had no idea how many slides to make (for a two-minute presentation), so I took my normal deck and trimmed it to… two: product and team. It turned out everyone else was pitching enterprise hardware/software, and ran way over. I'm not sure to be proud of the fact that I stuck to the constraint, or silly for not doing my full pitch, but we inferred some good feedback from the questions asked after, so I'm happy with the outcome. For Plug and Play itself, it was the opposite of the coworking spaces in the city: all cubicles, and more corporate feeling, though I definitely got the impression that everyone was there to just get work done, (plus it was the middle of the day, so there weren't any events going on, which they apparently do a lot of.) It kind of follows the general trend we saw from different areas on the trip: if you want to just get work done (hammer out an MVP), down in the valley is great. If culture and lifestyle are also important to you, the city is the place to be.Google
After Plug and Play, Bill had a meeting on Sand Hill Road, so after dropping him off, I only had about an hour, so I drove back down to Mountain View to check out the Google campus. Even though it was basically an office park, it definitely had the feel of a university campus. There were rec fields adjacent to it, lots of green space in general, and those funny colorful bicycles. Everyone riding those colorful bicycles seemed so care-free, which was probably because of how goofy people look on a bike that is a little too small for them.Majesty
After picking up Bill and dropping him off at SFO, I had a few more hours until my redeye, so I went back up to the city to have dinner with a couple more friends. I had some down-time before they got off work, and stumbled across Fort Mason, where I walked around for about an hour or so and took some touristy photos. The highlight here was watching the fog roll in to the bay. Every few minutes, it would creep a bit farther around the mountains on the south side and claim more of the Golden Gate. It's been a long time since I've seen something I'd describe as majestic. The fog was.Thanks for reading!
The random airbnb place in Palo Alto I got Tuesday night was the apartment of one of the 3 founders of airbnb and his wife. I won't mention his name or the place (because they don't mention it in the listing), but he and his wife were wonderful, and we talked Stanford and startups over dinner before he gave me a ride to an event that I didn't really have a plan on how to get to. Incredible first experience in the Valley.Deepak Kamra, Christine Herron, Rudy Garza, Mark Suster, Joel Yarmon
This was Larry Chiang's Reverse VC Panel. There were probably only 25 total attendees, and the topic was "How to get a VC to mentor you". Anthony Ha and Amy Saper did a great job of keeping it moving. A couple points that stuck with me here:
- Christine Herron noted how tough it is for women to find mentors, because of how inappropriate it would have been for her to regularly spend time with an older male mentor.
- They also noted a distinct difference between being contacted by a student for help/advice vs. someone out of school. Take note here, students: when you contact powerful people, they feel good helping you out while you still have a clean slate. Once you define yourself, either with a job or a startup, you're in a different world. Take advantage (see notes on Cory Levy below).
- There seems to be an incredible contradiction about a profession where to be successful you have to meet with as many smart people, working on world-changing things, as possible, but the whole time you're looking for a reason to tell them "no".Peter Theil (at NextGen Conference)
Peter is a very smart dude. A few notes I made from his talk include:
- He likes to invest in companies with a complex technology and complex sales process. He specifically mentioned SpaceX, and how building rockets and selling them to the federal government is pretty much as complex as it gets.
- Starting a big company is no less risky than starting a small company, so take big investment and shoot for the moon. He said they like to invest in companies that will never exit otherwise.
- He also talked about how silly it is to try to start a company in consumer internet or mobile right now, because it's incredibly crowded. Oops.Mark Suster (again)
Mark's talk was on mistakes he made and what can be learned from them. I follow Mark's blog and he reiterated a lot of points he discusses there, so I didn't have a ton of take-aways here. I definitely love hearing a 15-minute recap of the life of an entire company, especially from the times of the dot-com bust. Tons to learn about the mentality of the industry there. Mark's subtle humor and self-deprecation also make him a pretty likable guy.Keith Rabios
Keith has the intelligent, confident, but casual demeanor of a tech executive. I can see what makes people want to follow him. The thing that impressed me about Keith is that he is still in an operational role at a startup after all his success. That's passion.Cory Levy
Cory is notable because he is a freshman in college in Texas and put together the NextGen Conference where the previous three speakers spoke. Awesome conference, Cory. You're money.Founder's Den
At NextGen and for the rest of the trip, I was joined by an investor/advisor of ours at Heyo, Bill Boebel, who built a company and sold it to Rackspace a few years ago. Bill and I headed up to the city (apparently even people who live in San Jose are referring to San Francisco when they say "the city") after NextGen for a meeting with Jason Johnson and Jonathan Abrams at the new Founders Den. I doubt this post will hit their Google Alert because they just opened a few days ago and had Forbes (among other publications) in there interviewing them the same day we were there. Their idea is to fill their space with about half experienced (2nd-time +) entrepreneurs, and half first-timers, about 10 companies total. It was definitely an incredibly experienced group that they have put together there, and a beautiful space.Twitter HQ
A couple blocks up from Founders Den is Twitter's HQ. A friend of Bill’s from Rackspace who recently left for Twitter to work on Cassandra big-data applications, was still at work and brought us up to the Twitter offices to take a look around. It doesn't seem that long ago that nobody outside of the Valley took Twitter seriously. Being in this awesome office with hundreds of engineers was very cool - some kind of odd proof for me that going for a big world-changing idea that people will mock as a real business really can "work out". It was 7pm on a Thursday and there was still a lot of activity at Twitter... their legal team was even having a mini happy hour.Awesome View of the City
On the way to dinner, Bill accidentally put us on the Bay Bridge. (We turned around on Treasure Island.) On the way back we had the most incredible view of San Francisco I'd ever seen, with the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop to the newly lit city in the early evening. If you've never been to SF, I recommend accidentally taking the Bay Bridge.Peruvian, Margharitas, Racer 5, and Bikers
Wednesday night we went out in San Francisco with some friends. It was a damn fun night, with one of the highlights being randomly running into Alex Polvi and a friend at Zeitgeist at 12:30am having grilled cheese sandwiches. Alex's company, Cloudkick, was recently acquired by Rackspace, and interestingly Alex knew all about me and Heyo, having reviewed our YC application in the Fall (we weren't accepted). That makes him one of probably five people in California who knew what Heyo was back in early November before we released our initial apps.Citizen Space
Thursday morning, after a slow start and driving around the city a bit in the morning (including the squiggly road), I checked out a few coworking spaces around the city while Bill was in meetings all day. First was Citizen Space, which has a great location on 2nd street. Apparently this was the first space of its kind in the city when it got started (2006?). I like that it's not expensive and not-for-profit, and the folks I talked to there were very down-to-Earth. Very quiet and casual.Pier 38
Everyone we spoke to about coworking spaces in the city mentioned Pier 38 as an awesome place to work. Part of the space is Polaris Ventures/Dogpatch Labs, and the rest is managed separately. I hadn't had any luck with getting in touch with a Dogpatch person, and couldn't find any other contact info regarding the space, so I just dropped in. After getting a bit of work done in the cafe area, I got to chat with Ken Thom, the manager of the space. Ken is the nicest guy I've ever met, and the space is amazing. Beautifully furnished, awesome location, awesome views, and startups we read about everyday housed there.SOMAcentral
SOMAcentral had been recommended to me, but I couldn't find anything about it online. Ken manages this space as well though, and it worked out that he was able to show me around this space too (it is a few blocks away from Pier 38). This space was much more officey and less open than Pier 38, but had some amazing companies and some offices with excellent views of the city. Thanks, Ken!pariSoma
If Pier 38 and SOMAcentral had a classy, professional-but-still-startup feel, pariSoma felt much younger and scrappier. It's a few blocks away in a different part of town than the others I went to (North part of The Mission), and definitely felt a bit more indie. I think the major difference is that Pier 38 and SOMAcentral had mostly angel- and venture-funded startups, while pariSoma probably had mostly seed-funded and bootstrapped startups. They're moving into a much larger new space in a few weeks (right around the corner from the current space) as well.Facebook House/HQ
Thursday afternoon we headed back down towards Palo Alto, this time taking I-280 instead of the 101. Good call, Paul. We took the Sand Hill Road exit, and Bill pointed out all the big VC firms, though the buildings are all incredibly nondescript. Bill had found the address to the original Facebook house somewhere online, and as we weaved through some neighborhoods to avoid traffic, we kind of stumbled upon Facebook Headquarters, which seems to be in a very residential part of Palo Alto. When we finally came across the Facebook House, it was predictably unremarkable, though I will say I was disappointed that I couldn't even find it as a location on Facebook Places. (Sorry to whoever actually lives there, it probably gets old having cars creep slowly by while trying to perform a check-in.)500 Startups
Thursday evening was the 500 Startups/Startup2Startup holiday party at the new 500 Startups incubator space off Castro Street (in Mountain View). Bill is a mentor and LP in the fund, and this was the grand opening of the new space (guessing that's why it was a holiday party in January). So, Dave McClure knows how to throw a party, or at least how to budget for one. Amazing food, top shelf open bar, a pirate doing magic tricks, and a photo booth with pirate paraphernalia were the highlights. It also seemed like every venture fund sent somebody along (met Bill’s friend Yujin at Andreessen Horowitz), as well as all the major tech blogs (even Scoble). It was my first SV party, so I have no idea if that is the norm or exception for seed-stage incubator parties, but it was quite the experience.Breakfast at Joanie's off California Av.
I wouldn't necessarily mention this as noteworthy (though the breakfast crepe with smoked apple sausage at Joanie's was phenomenal), but after seeing so many "celebrities" of the valley in the previous couple of days, I'd be remiss to not mention this experience: After a delightful breakfast with a friend who is a hardware engineer at Apple, I found myself face-to-face with Paul Graham while walking out of the restaurant. I stammered the wittiest thing I could conjure ("Hey, Paul Graham!"), which I think made us both instantly uncomfortable, and I slinked away. Sorry, pg.Plug and Play Labs
After a few minutes of downtime in a coffee shop on University Avenue, we had a late-morning appointment at Plug and Play down in Sunnyvale. I was supposed to give a two-minute pitch to a group of "Executives in Residence", though didn't realize I needed an accompanying slide deck (for a two-minute presentation) until we arrived and everyone else had one. I had no idea how many slides to make (for a two-minute presentation), so I took my normal deck and trimmed it to… two: product and team. It turned out everyone else was pitching enterprise hardware/software, and ran way over. I'm not sure to be proud of the fact that I stuck to the constraint, or silly for not doing my full pitch, but we inferred some good feedback from the questions asked after, so I'm happy with the outcome. For Plug and Play itself, it was the opposite of the coworking spaces in the city: all cubicles, and more corporate feeling, though I definitely got the impression that everyone was there to just get work done, (plus it was the middle of the day, so there weren't any events going on, which they apparently do a lot of.) It kind of follows the general trend we saw from different areas on the trip: if you want to just get work done (hammer out an MVP), down in the valley is great. If culture and lifestyle are also important to you, the city is the place to be.Google
After Plug and Play, Bill had a meeting on Sand Hill Road, so after dropping him off, I only had about an hour, so I drove back down to Mountain View to check out the Google campus. Even though it was basically an office park, it definitely had the feel of a university campus. There were rec fields adjacent to it, lots of green space in general, and those funny colorful bicycles. Everyone riding those colorful bicycles seemed so care-free, which was probably because of how goofy people look on a bike that is a little too small for them.Majesty
After picking up Bill and dropping him off at SFO, I had a few more hours until my redeye, so I went back up to the city to have dinner with a couple more friends. I had some down-time before they got off work, and stumbled across Fort Mason, where I walked around for about an hour or so and took some touristy photos. The highlight here was watching the fog roll in to the bay. Every few minutes, it would creep a bit farther around the mountains on the south side and claim more of the Golden Gate. It's been a long time since I've seen something I'd describe as majestic. The fog was.Thanks for reading!
