Arrival - by Johan-Ulrik Lervang

So we finally arrived in San Francisco - the culmination of two months of waiting.  Having grabbed two cabs we went to our rented town houses and met up with Marie and Lasse from Innovation Center Denmark and divided the houses between the AAU and CBS delegations.

This week we had several great encounters. On Wedensday we went to Stanford. On a personal note, this visit has been one of the most inspiring visists I've ever been on. First we met up with the the Danish Ph.D, Michael Mose Biskjær, for a talk on Design thinking and on what Stanford does differently when it comes to promoting Entrepreneurship. Afterwards we met up with a student organisation called Bases that focuses on entrepreneurial activies in the student community. This was followed by a lecture from Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL, on creating disruptive companies. Especially the two first points of the day made quite an impression and gave me a lot of thoughts about how to change things back home. While both sessions, and in general sessions throughout the week, have focussed on how the very air in the Bay area is different and producing entrepreneurs, you also get the distict feeling, that this is happinging due to the concentration of capital and talent in the region.

The first week was ended with a lunch session together with Scott Engler, the CEO of Long Board Media, where he told us about Venture Capital and Bootstrapping. Compared to previous sessions on the subject, this proved to be very interesting, as Scott was both able and willing to weigh in with both an overview as well as personal experience and insight regarding the subject. Scott also confirmed that for a startup Silicon Valley was not the place to start out. The competition for qualified workers is simply too high and for a new startup the ability to offer competitive wages and other employee goods was simply not high enough compared to big guys like Google.

All in all a productive week - We got settled, the jetlag has surpassed and we have gotten a thorough introduction to the workings of Silicon Valley. We also had a companion from the Ministry of Education for the first week, Torsten, who was in himself quite inspiring when it comes to entrepreneurship policy in practice.

While we have yet to really work with our own ideas, we have gotten a small amount of feedback already and we are looking forward to see what the next three weeks will bring.


Photos by Jakub Bares