Friday, September 16, I attended 3 “bilateral meetings”.The first one took place in downtown San Francisco, in Uber HQ.
The first one took place in downtown San Francisco, in Uber, which is in the same building as Square and across the street from Twitter.
That same morning there was a big story about how much money Uber is losing, and how artificially high their valuation is, but of course, nobody wanted to talk about that.
Thursday, September 15 I had several meetings in Silicon Valley.
The first one was with the Director of Strategic Investments at the Microsoft Technology Center in Mountain View. Since it is business related, I won`t comment anything about that very interesting meeting.
The second one was with a Partner at Google Ventures. The discussion was to the point and provocative. It is interesting to note that Google and Google Ventures are NOT the same company.
Wednesday, September 14 I spent the whole day at K&L Gates, one of the largest law firms in the world, which has customers like Microsoft (the “Gates” in K&L Gates is for Bill Gates’ father), Amazon, etc.
It was a typical upscale law firm setup: expensive video conference equipment and giant screens (I liked their “rear projector and mirror” trick) in a high-rise building with impressive views, and some art, like the “flying dildos” in reception.
On September 13, Mind the Bridge hosted a policy hackathon sponsored by Dell at the MTB Innovation Center in San Francisco. The Dell PolicyHack™ brought together entrepreneurs and U.S./EU policy experts to solve policy challenges. The goal is to productively brainstorm and to provide top-line thinking that can inspire and serve as basis to develop and implement full policies.
My team was formed by:
Sara R. Klucking (Section Chief, Innovation & Programs, Office of Science and Technology Cooperation, US Department of State) Bogdan Ceobanu (Policy Officer, Startups & Innovation, European Commission) David Hodgson (CEO, Hummingbird Labs) me The five teams had 75 minutes to come up with a policy solution to issue areas that impact entrepreneurs.
Tuesday September 13 was a day devoted to workshops, a policy hackathon, and a visit to Pinterest HQ.
As I have mentioned before, we have been fortunate to have a great group of mentors. In this case we enjoyed the following sessions in small groups:
Market growth with: the CEO of CorkBIC, a former Microsoft BizDev VP, and the co-Founder & Director of Blippar Funding with: the Chair of Global Venture Forum, a Director at Woodside Capital, and a Partner at Delta Partners Group M&A/IPO with: the Principal M&A Integration at Google, a Managing Partner at Woodside Capital, and a Partner at Penningtons Manches Communication/PR with: the President of ActiveMedia, and the Associate Director at Oxygen PR After that we had a policy hackathon competition (more about that in the next blog post).
Monday, September 12, was the European Innovation Day (EID) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Although the museum is not open on Mondays, we had access to a few of the exhibits, like the one about the IBM 1401, the awesome PDP-1 (Creating the Hacker Culture), and autonomous vehicles (and yes, of course, I go into a Google driverless car, and took a selfie).
But the reason why we went there was not (only) to see the museum but to participate in the EID event.
One of the things that strikes me the most in this trip is how many homeless there are in SF. The income inequality is so obvious and insulting, it hurts. I know this is not a “SF-only” problem, but here it is a lot more visible than in many other cities.
As I walk from Union Sq. to Tender Nob through Geary or O’Farrell streets, or as I go to work in SOMA, I see homeless and people in need all over the sidewalk.
