A Week of Conferences (Part 3)

Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston’s Masterclass

From left to right: Joe DiNucci, Bob Goodson, Paul Graham, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston

After the morning Garage session, masterclasses and tutorial sessions filled up the rest of the day. Paul and Jessica gave a masterclass focusing on the trends surrounding the current growth in Web start-ups.

Paul started off by naming 7 key drivers:

1. Moore’s Law ( => hardware is becoming cheaper and cheaper)
2. The Internet itself ( => easy distribution – Facebook, TechCrunch etc.)
3. Open source – software is free
4. Programming languages – quicker and easier to build Web applications e.g. Ruby on Rails
5. Attitudes – start-ups are accepted as something people can do successfully (more on US West Coast than elsewhere)
6. Funding – easier to get both seed and venture capital
7. Tax law – income tax rates are lower, so there is more financial incentive for founders

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A Week of Conferences (Part 2)

The Garage

At 9am on a chilly Monday morning, I strolled down to the Said Business School with my housemate Alasdair Bell, the current President of OE (Oxford Entrepreneurs). Over the weekend, Alasdair and I had been discussing the topic for the morning Garage session – dedicated to OE. The “Garage” at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford is a workshop where dozens of people get divided up into small groups; the groups are then guided through a multi-stage creative process and subsequently come up with ideas related to the topic in question.

I suggested:

“How can start-ups compete with Goldman Sachs to hire Oxbridge graduates?”

- a question to which many young British founders would like to have an answer. Given that the majority of the participants in the session would be current students, they settled on:

“How can we make it more appealing for graduates to go and work on a start-up rather than a large corporate?”

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Silicon Where? (Part 3)

What the chance encounter with Eddie Codel and the subsequent LunchMeet interview interview really highlights is the way that things “just happen” in Silicon Valley. Due to the higher density of people working in start-ups, the probability of randomly bumping into someone useful is higher than anywhere else in the world. Whether it’s funding, a new employee, press coverage or just good, solid advice that one is looking for, it might well be waiting just around the corner. This is not to say one can’t start companies elsewhere, it just means that it’s often easier in the Valley.

Accelerating the start-up process is early-stage investment fund Y Combinator, set up in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris. The concept is that around 8 founder teams are selected to work in Cambridge, MA each summer and Mountain View, CA each winter. They then embark on a 3-month process involving a “Demo Day” in week 6 and an “Investor Day” in week 10. During the 3 months, the participants are networked in with many of the top Internet entrepreneurs through master classes, dinners and various other events involving product, marketing and legal experts. Invariably, this results in all the teams receiving substantial funding and going on to form successful companies.

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Facebook Co-Founder Andrew McCollum speaks in Oxford

Andrew McCollum

At 6.15pm on Monday this week, Andrew McCollum, Co-Founder of Facebook spoke at the Said Business School in Oxford. Afterwards, I had the honour of meeting him along with Andy Young and some other Oxford students.

Andrew first introduced the genesis of Facebook referring to 3 founding members: Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Andrew McCollum. In Andrew’s words:

“Mark was the high-level thinker, Dustin did operations – stuff like looking after the servers and communicating with the users, while I did all the graphics for the first version of the site, lots of backend development and also built up a reputation as ‘the solver of hard problems’.”

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Silicon Where? (Part 2)

Other than visiting Michael Birch at Bebo, entrepreneurial landmarks that greeted us during the Silicon Valley trip included Google, Facebook and Crystal Towers – affectionately known as the “Y Scraper” since it has so many residents from the Y Combinator program.

Google stood out though – it recently beat McKinsey to #1 in Fortune magazine’s annual list of the top 100 MBA employers (arguably the most reputable ranking of employers available). With their gyms, games rooms, unlimited free exotic cuisine, campus environment and density of super-smart people working in sunny Mountain View, it’s not hard to understand why. Having been started up by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998, they’re now a $210bn company and are still growing fast 9 years later!

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Silicon Where? (Part 1)

Welcome to Freed from The Matrix, the new weblog being written by David Langer. I have been motivated to write this blog following a recent trip to Silicon Valley. I aim to provide some insight into the lives of young UK entrepreneurs as they embark on changing the world with their new ideas.

There is much hype surrounding “the Valley” and starting technology companies there. And I’m inclined to say that this is well deserved. With companies such as Google, Yahoo, Apple and many of the other tech giants hailing from this 50 mile-high oval shaped area between San Francisco and San Jose, it certainly has the credentials.

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