Along with my EO Vancouver Chapter of 82 Entrepreneurs, we hit Silicon Valley
for a whirlwind tour of some of the most exciting and influential companies in
the Valley. As I write this, I'm thinking of you the reader who may not be so
excited as I was in seeing these businesses, so I'll keep it short but please
allow my enthusiasm to shine through. To me, Silicon Valley is the Disneyland of
tech business entrepreneurs like me.
We had some very memorable visits to the Apple Campus,
Google, Microsoft, ZenDesk, Kiva and SalesForce. Even during social time at the
hotel we had fantastic speakers like the founder of California Closets and
founder of Grasshopper.
My main takeaway from Silicon Valley was how they all
approached business - it seemed fearless, ready to make mistakes fast, learn,
adjust and then accelerate some more. Oh, and find really smart hard working
people. Everything happened in Dog Years the COO of ZenDesk explained. (He
already built MySQL to a $100mm business then sold it for $1b in under 5
years).
Second takeaway was although culture at the big companies
like Google is legendary for all the cool stuff they offer employees, it's not
that much different than what we already do at Costless, and in some ways I
think we do it better, at least for us. So afterwards I was much less
intimidated that these big legends of the valley had some sort of secret fairy
dust we couldn't duplicate. It was like pulling back the curtain in the Wizard
of Oz - ah ha, yup, OK... Now that I see how it all works and it's not magic,
it's just persistence, vision and hard work - and we can do that in
spades.
Cheers
Calvin
