Silicon Valley Trip Journal: Prologue

Valadoo co-founder Jaka Wiradisuria recently went to the United States to visit Silicon Valley as part of a program by Endeavor.org for young tech entrepreneurs. He began chronicling his trip on his blog earlier this month and we've been given permission to republish his posts here on DailySocial.

It's been two weeks since I came back from the States, but I can still feel the 'disruption' within. As person who are passionate in entrepreneurship and tech industry, this trip is like a pilgrimage to the 'holy land' where I can get a chance to witness the environment that agglomerated prominent tech companies such as Google, Linkedin, Yahoo, Flipboard, etc. that change the world we live in and inspire today's young generation to follow their dreams by means of entrepreneurship.

I have always known that Silicon Valley -which consists of several smaller areas such as Palo Alto, Menlo Park, SunnyVale, Mountain View, Cupertino and so forth- is a 'special' place, but never got any clearer picture until I experienced it myself. It has almost all the ingredients needed to create a perfect environment for creating a disruptive startup, i.e. the source of capital (both financial and intellectual), the infrastructure and most importantly, the people.

In the first place, my journey to Silicon Valley, or the Bay area as it is referred to by some people, was to attend the entrepreneur networking event held by Endeavor.org, a global nonprofit that transforms emerging countries by supporting high-impact entrepreneur in the emerging countries. But along the way, I found out that there were plenty of events that were worth attending during my 10 day stay in San Francisco, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles.

I attended at least five events (Endeavor.org Silicon Valley tour, ICS/Indonesia Connection at Stanford networking dinner, TechCrunch Disrupt, Gogobot.com End-of-summer party, and Salesforce.com Dreamforce 2012 conference), five tech company visits (Linkedin, Google, Yahoo, Gogobot, and Flipboard), several follow up meetings and caught up with old friends as well as making new ones where each and every one of them resulted in networking with priceless value.

There were plenty of lessons learnt and perspectives that I'd like to share to anybody who has particular interest in both entrepreneurship and tech startups. To ensure it is easy-to-read and in context I'll put it in different topics within this blog.

Happy reading and please don't hesitate to drop any note. Totally open for discussion.

Cheers