Lessons learned in Silicon Valley.
I have just visited Silicon Valley with Thomas Young. We
were in the Bay area for three days, and it was without question the most
intense period of learning both of us have ever done.
In this blog I’m going to try and give a snapshot of our
learning points.
Our trip was funded through four sources, which we’d like to
extend our highest gratitude to. SantanderUK, Lancaster University Enterprise Centre, Lancashire City Council and the Institute for Entrepreneurship & Enterprise Development – thank you!
The purpose of our trip was to find seed funding for our
stealth startup.
Day 1:
We arrived in San Francisco at 5.30pm on Tuesday evening and
we were already late. We had booked in to talk to an investor called John Ricci
at 7pm at Startup Basecamp.
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| (Welcome to) |
Having already made a (pretty random) (and fantastic) connection with a
startup genius in Chicago Airport during our connection, Tom and I were
feeling optimistic about our trip.
With no time to stop at the hotel after our 25-hour journey,
we headed to Startup Basecamp.
The place looked completely inconspicuous from the outside,
just a normal/rundown looking building, you had to go up some stairs and ring a
doorbell inside to access the place.
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| Grand entrance |
ü
In Silicon Valley startups and spaces creep
out of the walls. Just because it doesn’t look impressive from the outside, it
doesn’t mean it won’t inside. Go with it.
We met a huge array of personalities when we arrived. A guy
called Oliver was running a FinTech startup competing against PayPal, there was
someone called Matt who was a PhD student running a startup that used
Behavioural Economics to it’s advantage.
After listening to a few people pitch and hear the feedback
they got, it was our time to pitch. We had been awake for over a day and back
in UK time it was about 5am. Tester!
We made the following learning points from our pitch and
others’ feedback:
ü
Identify
your problem clearly and precisely before you do anything else. It’s good to
start your pitch to a VC with about 20 seconds of basic description about your
product, then go straight into the problem you are solving in a
‘problem>solution’ format.
ü
If you’re
trying to raise substantial amounts of money, you’re going to need traction
with your MVP first. Investors out here are in such high demand that you will
be pretty easily dismissed if you haven’t got data about your users yet. Try
using your network (family and friends) to build small seed money if you
haven’t got traction yet.
ü
Don’t use
notes. And don’t wear a suit. One guy made a real rookie error of bringing a
page of notes and wearing a full suit. Mr Ricci told him straight away to put
the notes away when he started. Embarrassing. Peter Thiel says this about wearing suits.
Day 2:
On Wednesday were up early to travel from San Francisco to
San Jose to meet an influential VC in the Valley (we’ll call him ‘S’). The
range of transport methods here are crazy, check it out:
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| Bikes |
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| Skateboard |
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| Ganster... |
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| Segway |
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| Scooter... |
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| Monster double-storey train a.k.a Caltrain |
We opted for the Caltrain, which took us about 1.5 hours to
get down to San Jose. However, not having much money for Taxi’s, we ended up
taking a dubious path across the freeway to arrive at our final destination.
Not advised.
Feeling far more energetic than yesterday, we sat down at a
place called ‘Vito’s’ with S.
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| Our table |
On a side note before we get on to our learning points from
today, the service in America is unbelievable. Our waiter was actually showing
us video’s of the food we could eat and checked on us constantly. We
think it’s more of a culture thing though. Everyone is friendly here. The
cleaner in the train station went out of his way to help us.
Back to the meeting. The time in this meeting seemed to pass
incredibly quickly. S taught us so much. We went through out Pitch Deck with
him too.
ü
For seed
funding: Once you give the investor a solid reason to help you, you just need
to show him that “you’re not dicks” (his words not ours). Our reason to help
came from having a remarkably strong team for Sourcely, as well as a personal
connection from one of our team to S. Most of the time we spent was building
rapport with S to convince him we were good guys. Probably about 25% of the
discussion was on the product. If yours is good, investors will get it.
BUSINESS = RELATIONSHIPS
ü
Use connections to get stuff done. Smaller
point, but if you’re trying to reach out to a VC or an accelerator, make sure
you say, “XYZ recommended us to speak to you”. This makes the recipient
accountable to not just you but their colleague.
We stopped at Google in the afternoon, here’s some pictures.
Google have modelled their offices to look like a University campus. I
recommend reading 'How Google Works'. It’s brilliant, and talks a lot about the reasons why
Google Campus is like it is.
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| Groovy colours |
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| Free bikes for Employees to use |
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| Check out the T-rex |
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| Kids in a candy shop |
As a side note, never give Tom Young the map. His famous
last words as we walked to Google from the train station were ‘Yeah its well
close mate’ (Manchester accent)… an hour walk later in the blistering sun and
we arrive. Safe to say we Uber’d it on the way back.
Day 3:
On Thursday we were up at 7am again. Our body clocks had
adjusted by now so things were easier.
Today we planned to visit an Accelerator programme we had
been accepted into called ‘Founders Space’ (Instagram had offices there in the
early days).
Founders Space had a business event on that day that we were
able to attend. We forged lots of connections on this day, including an EU investor;
a Silicon Valley based recruitment firm and members of the Taiwanese
government.
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| Some impressive people, amongst many. |
Everyone is out here for the same reason; this makes the culture for
networking absolutely awesome. Speaking to people is easy and exciting.
There were four startups pitching on this day. Here are some
lessons we learnt listening to the feedback from the pitches:
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Avoid using
videos in your pitch. It puts your pitch in danger of tech failure and shows
you kinda can’t sell… The guy had a nightmare with his deck because the videos
weren’t responding quickly. It completely negated his efforts with his pitch.
ü
Stick to
your time. Don’t waste investor’s time. One of the pitches was (brutally)
stopped because it went 15 seconds over. Some will be more strict than others
but as a rule try to get it done in the time to save having to recover from
embarrassment.
ü
70 Team /
20 market / 10 product. This seems to be a rough rule of thumb for exciting
investors. The team behind your product are HUGELY important. If you have a
remarkable team, then you can pivot and tweak your product. A good team can
also act as pre-validation for your idea if you haven’t built an MVP yet.
Investors love a good team.
Last day:
Today
we had left free to allow us to set up meetings during our time out in Silicon
Valley. As an indication of how able you are to set-up meetings and connect
with people out here, this was what our schedule looked like (bear in mind we
didn’t have anything on Friday planned):
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8am call
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9am call
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11am meeting
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5pm evening meeting
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8pm networking event
ü
There can be no doubt Silicon Valley is the
space to connect with tech entrepreneurs and investors.
In the afternoon, Tom and I took some time out to visit
Stanford University, which is situated in the heart of Silicon Valley: Palo
Alto. Here are a few pictures from our time at Stanford:
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| Stanford lecture hall |
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| "One of our many libraries" |
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| Leading to the main square |
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| Our humble chapel here at Stanford.............. |
In a word, our trip was incredible.
In a remarkably short space of time, we were able to build strong links to
VC’s, new friends and startups.
Silicon Valley is an amazing place to learn about
entrepreneurship, and we have been so lucky to have the opportunity.
We’ve included some other pictures of the trip below.
What is left to say is thank you once again to the sponsors,
and keen an eye out for information about our new startup. Information to come soon.
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