Silicon Valley Tour 2011- day 4

An Incubator, Twitter, a startup with 1 Million active users, a venture capitalist and a dinner at the German house in Stanford. – Another great packed day for the pioneers is over!

The day started off with meeting Paul Bragiel, co-founder of I/O Ventures, a company that supports young startups in the early stage by offering them a working place as well as support in fundraising, scaling and networking. Whereas other accelerators or incubators only support startups from Silicon Valley, I/O Ventures is open to startups from all over the world as long as they seem promising. Paul’s maxim for the pioneers was “Be motivated- don’t go after the money!”.

A couple blocks away was our next stop at the headquarter of the now five year old company Twitter! Thomas Arend presented the success story to our group while we enjoyed the free lunch from probably one of the best cafeterias in the world. Twitter was originally developed as a tool to help the five co-founders to communicate among each other. Only later it became the actual product. The growth of twitter in the last two years has brought new opportunities and challenges. However, there are a lot of critics who say twitter isn’t useful. Twitter’s response: ”neither is ice-cream”. The acceptance of failure, the support for entrepreneurs and the attitude towards founding were pointed out by Thomas as key differences between the Valley and Germany. Advice for the Germans: “relax”.

The next stop was Github, a web-based hosting service for software development projects that attracted over one Million users since November 2008. The co-founder Chris Wanstrath talked to us for more than one hour about his business model and answered tons of questions about his life as a geek. Before building this now very successful company Chris build two start-ups that failed because he only wanted to make money. Instead Github is a service that helps him in his daily coding. In his opinion start-ups with the motivation of solving a problem have a better chance of being successful compared to entrepreneurs who only want to make money.

Our last date in San Francisco was with Sebastian Pollok from BV Capital, a venture capitalist. We met at his office which is located on the 43rd floor of the Transamerica Pyramid, the tallest skyscraper in the San Francisco skyline. He told us what a venture capitalist does and in which ways BV Capital differs from other investors like Sequoia Capital. Before investing any money a venture capitalist has to raise a fund. BV Capital specialized in early stage investments. Therefore they usually invest relatively small amounts compared to other venture capitalist that finance companies after they have reached a certain size. Sebastian also gave an advice to all the young entrepreneurs who are trying to find the right venture capitalist: Ask the investors when they raised their fund for the last time and check if your startup fits with their portfolio.

For dinner we were invited to the German House, a place on Stanford campus where students live who are somehow related to Germany. While some of the pioneers took the opportunity to play some pool or tabletop soccer, the others used the time to reflect on what we have experienced during the day.

Tomorrow we will be in Mountain View to meet David Lieb, the co-founder of Bump, and Peter Levine, a partner of the venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz. Later in the evening a couple of pioneers will have the chance to talk to Burton Lee over dinner. At the same time the rest of the group will get in touch with members of the Stanford entrepreneurial club Bases and students from Korea. Stay tuned!!