Life is Back in the Valley

This was the message of the ‘Silicon Valley comes to Oxford’-event which I attended for OpenBusiness. November 20th for the sixth time the experiment of getting the visionary entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and the bright academic crowd from Oxford University to exchange their ideas on the newest developments in the tech sector was repeated at Said Business School. With a very interesting panel discussion featuring no less than 12 speakers and master classes AKA ‘garage sessions’ by the speakers, Said Business School succeeded well.

With low start-up costs and less noise than in the last hype Silicon Valley seems to be the place again to launch a tech-business and, what everybody seems to want, sell it to Google for a couple of million. This is of course what you go to business school for, so it was a day full of wisdom and advice. In The Valley everything you need is present. Money angels, Venture Capital providers, willing banks, understanding lawyers and everybody else who wants to make money. Want to become rich yourself? A few tips from the experts:
∑ Start with little money
∑ Do something you like (just make sure it is something a lot of other people like as well)
∑ Go out there, meet geeks and befriend them. They will be the future heart of your business.

Social networks and mass collaboration as seen in the open source-movement have the future. The best way to take off according to Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives of Google, is ‘get an internet connection, some 6.000 $ start-up money, ramen noodles and then just get started’. Don’t bother about business plans and finishing school; just make sure you have plenty of traffic on your website. That is what everybody in The Valley is looking for. Simple ideas tend to be the better ones.

But what if you are not in The Valley? Move there! Otherwise copy the successful business models from The Valley. The Americans in the panel admitted having ‘neither the experience, nor the time to deal with the rest of the world’. I am sure they just meant rolling out their businesses, but this idea might even apply to some other fields. Truly visionary.

See you at the next Minibar! The more geeks, the better…

For more information about Said Business School and the event: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/news/archives/Main/Silicon+Valley+comes+to+Oxford.htm

For more information about the next Minibar:
http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/11/22/minibar/

Thanks TechCrunch for the image!