Silicon Valley Tour 2011- day 5

Building international connections to students from America, Europe and even Asia, today the Pioneers were making friends all around the globe!

The first stop of the day led us to Bump Technologies in Mountainview. Jake Mintz, one of the co-founders gave us an impressive introduction into the technology, his company as well as his plans for the future. Bump Technologies developed an app, to transfer data from one smart-phone to another by “bumping” them together. One of the technical difficulties is matching the two phone-partners, only with tracking time and place, which both have enormous imprecision. Typical for the Silicon Valley, the company could raise a budget of 20 Million Dollars without even having a business model, or the will to charge and therefore earn money.
Message of the session: “find the right role inside your startup”.

At 1:00 pm we had a get-together with Peter Levine and Shannon Callahan, partners of the venture capitalist Andreessen Holowitz, at their office in Menlo Park. Since we have already met with Sebastian Pollock from BV Capital the day before we were able to compare the different philosophies the two firms are pursuing. Whereas BV Capital exclusively does early stage investment, Andreessen Holowitz also invests in companies in later rounds. Therefore their portfolio consists of billion-dollar-companies like facebook, Groupon and Skype. Peter told us that he and his partner look at three criteria before he funds a startup. When entrepreneur pitch their idea or product to them, they valuate the product itself, the market situation as well as the team. Peter’s word of advice was that we should only get “A-players” on our team to keep the qualities and ambitions up.

In the afternoon we participated in the weekly Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture that is set up by the student entrepreneur group Bases. This week’s speaker was the co-founder of “method”, a business in the field of detergent. Their mission is to “make cleaning clean again”. Therefore they do not use any toxic components for their products. Especially the way they market their product and how they presented themselves was very innovative. Most of the pioneers  especially enjoyed getting to know a successful start-up in the Valley that was not based on web technology. A student entrepreneurship club from Finnland (Aalto Entrepreneurship Society) and a delegation from Korea were also present.

After this lecture we separated into three groups. While a few of us got the chance to have dinner with Burton Lee, the others stayed at Stanford to either visit an iPhone app workshop or to get to know the members of Bases a little better. The student association provided typical American fall desserts which were a reason for the guests to stay a little longer. Getting the chance to talk to the international groups and the members of Bases gave us some beneficial input for new ideas for the Pioniergarage.

The iPhone app workshop was organized by Bases. For that event they invited Edward Marks, the developer of the “Shotgun”-app. He delivered an insight into the creative process and told us which different tools he used. Unfortunately we did not get to see any code and were not given any small introductions into app programming.

Tomorrow we will be all over the place. First we will meet with Jeff Clavier from Soft Tech in Palo Alto. Right after that we will be at facebook’s headquarters. From Palo Alto it goes to San Francisco where we meet Peter Thiel, one of the early facebook investors, and Dale J. Stephens, the co-founder of Uncollege. In the evening we are invited to foodzies launching party.
Stay tuned!!

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