By Bogdan Grosu  on Tue 19 Apr - 0 Comments
Categories: Career Trek Blogs

• Tweet

Before the trek actually started, I had built very high expectations for the upcoming trip. To say the least, the 2011 SV trek totally exceeded my expectations and I was actually blown away by both the quality of our company visits and the overall organization. The first visit was at VMware, where we met with a LBS alumnus and a fascinating Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose company was ultimately bought by VMware in a typical SV acquisition picked up by, amongst other publications, TechCrunch. The stage was set from the first visit for what followed next: talks by Google’s CFO (yes, you read that right!) and by Randy Komisar – Partner at Kleiner Perkins, pre-release testing of the Nintendo 3DS, and a very interesting talk by Dave Marquardt, Founder and Partner at August Capital, who among other things was one of the first investors in Microsoft.

Every visit, speaker, company was surreal in its own way but a few things were common to all of them:

• Passion – people in SV are passionate not only about what they do, but also about the companies they work for.
• Failure and next-generation – people in SV live and breathe entrepreneurship and technology. In such circumstances, failure (from both an investors’ and an entrepreneurs’ point of view) is an invaluable learning point and a necessary phase successful investors/entrepreneurs usually go through. Learning and support is passed down to the next generation in a virtuous cycle which not only makes Silicon Valley such a successful ecosystem, but also entirely unique.

I think I am right to say that this trip had a real influence on everyone who participated. My only thoughts after coming back home were around questions like: “How do I get a job there? I would really love to work for … “. For anyone interested in technology or entrepreneurship in the good company of like-minded colleagues in the wonderful San Francisco bay area, the next Silicon Valley trek is simply a must.