Ask HN: I'm going for a week to Silicon Valley, how to get most of it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5679294

by krudnicki • 13 years ago

9 7 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi! My name is Kamil, co-founder of TimeCamp, I'm from Poland, Europe. I'm planning to visit Silicon Valley for one week.

How to get most of my time there?

* What is best days to be there? * Where can I find meet ups? * How could I arrange meetings with interesting people? :)

orangethirty• 13 years ago

Why are you travelling half way around the world? (funding, hiring, vacations, etc.)

krudnicki• 13 years ago

Vacations to Canada to visit my family (3 weeks). I think I could learn and feel startups culture there.

I have a friend that was visiting silicon valley, and I was amazed by his stories.

But funding will be probably the topic on the plate that time. We are starting getting some traction, and want to sell scale it. Polish enterprise market is not big enough probably.

timrosenblatt3• 13 years ago

Since you're in Europe, check out http://www.seedcamp.com/ if you haven't already.

Realistically, you're unlikely to get an investment on this trip (if you do, hi5s all around...just don't expect it). The thing you can do is start building a relationship with smart people.

There's a lot of work if you want to do this right.

Find VCs (or people who publicize themselves as angel investors). Read their LinkedIn pages, blog posts, etc. The first 10-20 may take an hour each. Eventually you'll be able to get this down to 15 minutes each.

There are two goals here, one more important than the other.

Most importantly, find out which VCs have something really fucking smart to say about what you're doing. This almost always comes from a specific background in an area. Ideally, if they personally ran a company in that particular industry.

Secondarily, LinkedIn (and sometimes other methods) will tell you who you might know in common. Good VCs are really overwhelmed by the number of people that want to talk to them. Their schedules can be busy beyond anything you typically see in business. It's hard to explain the value of a mutual friend who says to the VC "you should really talk to Kamil, he's onto something here..."

And really, you don't need to physically be here to start those relationships. You can get a message to basically any professional investor. The trick is making the most of it.

Use what you learned from researching the investor to write an email that they'll reply to. One way is to make it a deep question, and not "what should a pitch deck contain?" or "how much do you normally invest?". These are superficial questions that will get ignored. A better question is something that undeniably proves you know about your industry.

<blockquote>Hi Investor Person. I saw that you have a background in the business-travel booking space, and I'd like your opinion on something.

There's been a rise of booking sites that are able to offer hotel and airline reservations at below-market rates thanks to the loophole that's in typical contracts allowing unrestricted pricing of bundled vacation deals.

Large businesses aren't taking advantage of these savings. They could easily buy these package deals and throw away the parts they don't want while still saving money 25% on their total travel costs.

Other than cost, what are the unspoken motivation of the people working in travel departments at Fortune 500 companies? </blockquote>

Those first two points are basically true (ignoring the fact that I'm just making up questions here). But I obviously know something about the industry, I'm not someone that used to be a dentist, and decided to quit and work on a business travel company (or if I am, I'm knowledgable about it). This type of question is good, because even if you're not a suitable investment, you might at least be able to tell the VC information they don't know, and that's valuable to them.

BTW I'm in SF, and I love meeting international visitors. Hit me up before you get into the city. tim at cloudspace. com

timrosenblatt3• 13 years ago

As one final thing: there are a lot of things you can do while here. My suggestion is one of many good ones.

(Ignoring my previous advice somewhat) I'd start by figuring out what types of things you could do, and then decide which you'd likely be good at. Then do that.

Hope to meet you in SF/SV.

coderforhire• 13 years ago

Get the most out of it? In-n-out Burger.

timrosenblatt3• 13 years ago

From an effort/reward perspective, this is the correct answer.

That or Super Duper. ;)

Killah911• 13 years ago

You can check Meetup.com and StartupDigest for Events happening in the area. If you're somewhat social, you can meet quite a few interesting people there. Also, I'd recommend stopping by Hacker Dojo. It's a great place to meet like minded hackers and get info on what to do and where to go. Will you be driving or using public transportation? SF is actually a good 30-45 minutes from the Valley, but a must visit place, totally different feel! There are quite a few interesting startups and hang out spots there as well. For me I think the events based and angle has worked the best. I went to a couple of hot spots last time, pulled out my laptop and worked, as was everybody else. But quite frankly, I can do that at home too :)

Ask HN: I'm going for a week to Silicon Valley, how to get most of it?

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