by Christian Berg  on Sun 17 Apr - 0 Comments
Categories: Career Trek Blogs

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My key takeaways from the SV trek were:

1) I should become an IT entrepreneur

2) no place is better for that than Silicon Valley

3) you can never turn down an opportunity because it might be the type of once in a life-time experience that the 2011 Tech trek turned out to be.

Throughout the trek, what had initially been only a hunch grew to become

painfully clear; you cannot have a bigger impact, more fun and a better

life than an IT entrepreneur. The impact on the world that most of the

companies that we visited have had is unfathomable. What was cutting

edge being developed in a university basement ten years ago is now taken

for granted in many parts of the world. The concentration of start-ups

in Silicon Valley is also difficult to understand until you go there. At

some of the events that we went people took for granted that whomever

they spoke to had start-up experience. A couple of minutes before Color

was first launched, we were in a bar meeting with various tech

companies, the entire facility went quiet as everyone had been curious

to try it out. Not only did they know that it was coming, they knew what

it was about and what time they could expect to be able to download it!

Silicon Valley has more advantages than just helping everyone there stay

informed about what is next. It has an ecosystem for supporting

entrepreneurs. This covers everything from culture, mentality, venture

capital to talent. There was some discord about how to rank these

attributes but the open and optimistic mentality was the most striking

to me.

The experience as a whole was invaluable and convinced me about what I

want to do, and where I want to do it.