From California-2, Palo Alto after a long time, Secret of the Silicon Valley

→Japanese

On the evening of 5th ,  I arrived  at  the San Francisco airport after a 2 hours delay, and was welcomed by Mr. Deepak Bangalore  (Called as DB), who was also with me at the Global Innovation Ecosystem 2007(GIES2007),  his daughter  who attended the Oxford University  and Ms. Hoshi of the Panasonic whom I met at the  World Knowledge Forum held in Seoul . We went straight to Palo Alto, the town of the Stanford University, at the heart of Silicon Valley (SV). We went to “TiE”(The Indus Entrepreneurs).

As the name suggests, this organization has several offices and many SV Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs were there.   The members mainly consisted of Indians many of them  connected to each other in some way or other.  If you look at the website, you realize that it is full of activities every day.

It looked like they were mostly Indians.  Around 100 people gathered around the table and exchanged opinions and information having wine and light snacks.  It was clearly an atmosphere of casual confidential talk.  Many people were introduced and visiting cards were exchanged. I was told that such extremely open gatherings took place every 2, 3 days a week.  How energetic. Can such gathering be imagined in Japan?
Maybe few attend every time but I never thought that so many people, may it be entrepreneurs or scientists or investors, would gather together so frequently. This is probably one of the secrets of the SV strengths. The “TiE” network has been spreading widely in the world. I am impressed with the Indian strength of organizing and providing this.

This evening, Dr. Burton McMurtry who is called the “Pioneer of Venture Capitalist” did an interview style speech at Stanford University Chair, Board of Trustees.  It was wonderful. This kind of people are the regulars. Even Mr. McMurtry looked like a lay person and didn’t appear to be so special.   But lots of Venture Capital information is exchanged through such gatherings, and human resource training/education, business strategy network building, result achievements are discussed and put into practice. This might be the secret of SV success. It is incredible to have many such extremely open places.

I left early for dinner with DB and his daughter, Ms.Hoshi, Mr. Hirose of Hitachi, Mr. Masa Ishii (former McKinsey, a Venture Capitalist established in SV), joined later by Prof. Richard Dasher (our host at Stanford visit), who had just returned from a meeting of Tohoku University. Well, we had a lively discussion on wide range of topics, and there was an after dinner session with Mrs. Ishi. This evening’s host of “TiE”, the incoming chairman Mr.Vish Mishra were also with us. It was a long but enjoyable day.