Our first day was oriented to understand what is the “secret sauce” of silicon valley, what makes it a special place on earth where everybody in the technology world is eager to go and create “the next big thing”. On this day (last monday) we had a number of conferences: personal perspectives during the morning, success stories in the afternoon.

During the morning trying to understand it form the personal perspective of two visions of the valley: Marco Marinucci, entrepreneur and now in Google, and Philipp Stauffer, with a long career at Accenture and now working as a sort of bridge between startups and big 500 companies that Accenture collaborates with. The perspective is somewhat clear: part of the secret is the money and the legal/financial system, part of it is the special culture of risk and failure. Where in most other places you will be considered a failure after you tried, here it this failure can become positive, help you in your next endeavor. Cultural shock coming from Spain, where failure is… let’s say not a good thing for your career even as an entrepreneur.

During the afternoon we had Jaleh Rezaei-Homami, from VMWare and Babur Odzen, CEO of Berggi and Naverggi. You all know Vmware. Great success story and they are just becoming bigger and better. One thing that was interesting about their approach was that they considered their main competitor… Microsoft. Which to me is a sign that there is still a number of issues to be said in the OS arena before Microsoft loses its leadership.
Berggi is a different story. They are still small, they create applications for mobile phones, and their story is about comming to the valley for the contacts, the money and the image. Very interesting approach by Babur, who has development teams all around the world working to be the fastest… management innovation to compete in a market where differentiation is difficult and speed is everything. I am sure they will be very successful.

Great start for our adventure. One of the first conclusions that will stay with us all the week was openness. The approach to sharing information and ideas is totally open, creating and environment of collaboration and positive feedback that is very interesting and different to a mora traditional “closed” approach.