Lots of Good Stuff

by Stephen Gregory Lutsch

Wow what an amazing first week. Innovation Center Denmark really outdid themselves with a fantastic program. Marie and Lasse did an incredible job! You could call it a crash course on Silicon Valley. Still fighting the almost 24 hours of jet lag from a few fog delays in Copenhagen and Zurich, we plunged right into the fast paced life here in San Francisco. There is definitely an energy here that is hard to describe. Besides this being the “center of the universe” for startups the area has tons to offer culturally. We happened to hit some gorgeous-danish-summer-like-weather so that made sight-seeing and walking to meetings an absolute joy. Highlights would have to include the visit to Google, speaker at Stanford campus by Marten Mickos and informal talk by Scott Engler of Longboard Media.

I had heard about how cool Google so I was a bit skeptical before our visit. However, I am very impressed that such a young company does so many things right. They have all the perks and seem to really invest in their most valuable resource…people. Also, the fact that they base projects on a 100 year timeframe is unheard of for a publicly held company. Apparently across the board 10% increases in salary was not enough so the CFO handed out a second bonus from his backpack. Thousand dollar bills to each employee. Crazy. That is a model for my future company. Big vision and solid follow through to make it happen.

Stanford has a pretty nice campus and that might be a bit of an understatement.  Every week they invite in a well known speaker to inspire both the audience and anyone around the world tuning in. This week’s speaker was Marten Mickos – CEO, Eucalyptus. The talk was “How to build international disruptive companies” since he was the CEO of MySql AB, the open source company that was eventually sold to Sun Microsystems for around 1 billion dollars. It was interesting how he described playing an antagonistic role with the big competitor of database products, Oracle. That they viewed themselves as David fighting Goliath. He encouraged small startups to not be afraid of “throwing rocks” at the big guys and you must get out there and “make waves”. Also, he commented that you need to have someone that really believes in you because growing a business is really hard. There is a ton of self doubt together with the struggles and successes. That makes sense to me.

Our last organized event of the week was one of the best. A very informal talk about advice on investment capital here in Silicon Valley and his insights on growing a company by bootstrapping. This was another great example of how things tend to work out here. People are very open and forthcoming. Not only when it comes to giving advice and listening to ideas/pitches but candidly explaining how they succeeded or failed. Let’s see the points that stick out for me were: start lean so you can keep things cheap, get customers and revenue/profit fast and the best time to take venture capital money is when you don’t need it. So a top trend coming out of everyone’s mouth is lean startup. A method of rapid prototyping the most basic product, getting this to customers for feedback, iterating the product until you have something customers will buy and doing all of this with as little capital as possible. Therefore, reducing your risk and burn-rate. This is a concept I am now starting to integrate into my business ideas.

Coming up is what happens here: meet-ups and networking events. These are used to gather information and get in contact with the right people. I have already had much success just talking to friends of mine here in California and mentioning a few of my ideas. Immediately, actually the day after we landed, I already met someone that was working in cleantech and energy like me and also connected me with three others. This evening we finally met through mutual friends over a beer and nerded out about the energy markets here in California while setting up a lunch date later in the week. Luckily we will able to attend the Cleantech Open 2011 Global Forum. I am really looking forward to this. I can’t wait to be informed and inspired. Off to working on the pitch and learning as much as possible.