Silicon Valley Tour 2011- day 3

What an amazing day!!
Even though our feet are killing us and we are all ready to go to bed, we couldn’t wait to tell you what we experienced on our third day.

The day started with meeting up with Ricky Yean, co-founder and CEO of Crowdbooster at 9 a.m. In the facilities of StartX he gave us the chance to talk to Laura Griffiths and Alexa Lee, who run StartX, some international entrepreneurs and himself. StartX is a non-profit accelerator for young startups that offers a co-working space, legal support and a network for their participants. Crowdbooster is an intelligent social media dashboard that helps companies to optimize their social media distribution channels. Message of the session: “Be generous and people will reciprocate.”

After lunch we met with Konstantin Guericke, co-founder of linkedIn, and three Germans who are currently attending Stanford University. Guericke told us what it is like to have founded a company which is now worth millions of dollars. Starting out in 2003 he and his partners were not concerned how to generate revenue. It was more important to them to achieve a critical mass of uers. At that time several startups were trying to establish a social network for business people and therefore they were forced to enter the market with a small product even though Guericke and the other co-founders had a lot of ideas for further features. He said that you can copy a business idea and still be succesful as long as you keep the product simple and reach the customers. Most important is not the idea itself but its implementation.

In the afternoon we got the opportunity to explore Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. Hendrik Dahlkamp and Christian Plagemann, two KIT alumnis, who are now working for the research department of Google, introduced us to the amazing world of their employer. We have learned that many companies in the Valley want to hire the best computer scientists in the world. Therefore Google wants their employees to be as happy as they can possibly be. Some of the benefits are high salaries, free food and drinks at any time, sports programs, laundry services and time to realize own projects.

Tonight we went to Startup Grind which is a similar event to our “Gründergrillen”. Jeff Clavier, a venture capitalist whom we will meet on Thursday, gave a speech about his job. Afterwards we got the chance to get in touch with other guests who are somehow related to the startup scene.

Tomorrow we will be in San Francisco visiting IO Ventures, Twitter, GitHub and BV Capital. Stay tuned!

StartX/Crowdbooster

Konstantin Guericke

Nele Hiller with her new Android Phone