Report from Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley Open Doors conference is not a window, but a door to Silicon Valley. Part 1: entrepreneurs, investors, insider and trends

This time we will talk about the conference, which was held in Silicon Valley. And not just conferences, but about an international event gathering leading investors, entrepreneurs and journalists from America and Russia. 2 times a year, in June and December, a large Silicon Valley Open Doors (SVOD) conference takes place in Silicon Valley, which traditionally brings together over 600 participants from the United States (Accel Partners, Sequoia, Emergence, Google Ventures, etc.). ) and Russia (Runa Capital, Almaz Capital, Troika Dialog, RUSNANO, etc.), startups, journalists (TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Bloomberg, etc.) and entrepreneurs.



The participants of such conferences have the opportunity to meet personally with successful entrepreneurs of the Valley, top investors, listen to the speeches of start-ups, learn and build relationships with potential partners.



For example, in an interview with the head of Evernote, a company with a market valuation of 2 billion dollars, said that he went to such activities to study entrepreneurship, and after participating in SVOD his company was able to get the first large investments, after which it “took off” - and as! Not bad described the essence of the conference, from tz. Russian start-up, one of the conference participants: “This is a great way to get acquainted with the Valley, where you can first have courage by talking in a comfortable Russian-speaking environment, and then approach the leading American investors and present your startup to them.”



This year, the June Silicon Valley Open Doors (SVOD) conference consisted of several parts:

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1) The official part , where the speakers spoke on the stage ( video ) - professors of Stanford University talked about the technology of creating cars without drivers (such as those developed by Google, Tesla, etc.) and venture investment methodologies, leading American investors shared their experience, editors at TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and a Bloomberg journalist talked about trends and engaged in dialogue with Evernote , Ring Central, and EmergenceCapital executives (the first Sales Force investor is the leader in CRM, which even Google uses.)



Especially Evernote CEO Phil Libin remembered many of his speeches when he said something like this: organizing a startup is the last thing; if you have any problem, then you need to find someone to buy a solution from; if there is no complete solution, collect it from various services; if there is none, then convince someone to do it; if you can't convince, then you can start up.



Anna Dvornikova, a venture investor, President of AmBAR and one of the organizers of SVOD, talks about the conference:





2) Presentations pitches startups before the jury of the leading American and Russian investors ( video ) - it is even very useful to listen to learn how to correctly build a presentation and answer tricky questions. We did a little research, asking investors twice about their preferences for participating startups: before and after presentations of startups - surprisingly, but almost no one had any preferences before, everyone made their conclusions after the startups pitches, which indicates the importance of careful preparation of presentations.





A group of well-known US investors evaluates the presentations of startups: Brian Jacobs (Emergence Capital partner and first investor in Salesforce), Ammar Hanafi (General Partner, Alloy Ventures), Saar Gur (General Partner, Charles River Ventures - first investor in Twitter)



Alexey Fedoseev is a serial entrepreneur, CEO and founder of 1World Online , a former director of product development at Motorola, who sold his previous startup for several tens of millions of dollars. He shares his impressions about the SVOD conference and about his presentation on the stage in front of investors:





3) Networking (born networking - there is no equivalent in the Russian language) is probably the most important part of all such events. After all, where else, if not at such events, can one approach and talk with top American investors, make contacts with influential journalists, or even shake hands with Phil Libin or PayPal founder Max Levchin .



( photo not from June, but from an earlier SVOD conference )



Below are some more participants telling about their impressions, trends and sharing their life experiences.



Frequent guest in Silicon Valley and famous Russian business woman Elena Masolova - co-founder of Eduson.tv, Groupon Russia, CEO of Pixonic. Presented on SVOD its new startup in the field of education Eduson.TV, aimed at the global market.





American investors, such as Brian Jacobs (well-known investor from companies such as Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, Lithium, Yammer, Veeva, SupportSpace, Echosign, Box), are considered a very “hot" area of ​​the enterprise due to the increased demand in the B2B sector. Brian also noted mobile, cloud, the decline in popularity of B2C and CleanTech, and also advised not to follow the trends too much, because if you have a good application for users (B2C) that you believe in, then it is very likely that by the time you run, B2C will be on the horse again.





Interesting American B2B-Startap BuildersCloud, a cloud service for large construction companies (for drawings, for example), was presented by its founder with Russian roots, Andrei Nohrin, a former manager of a construction company, now a resident of TechStars incubator. BuildersCloud received an offer also from 500 Startups, but chose TechStars, which, according to Andrew, is better. Andrey’s adviser is Sergey Burkov, a member of the Board of Directors and co-founder of AmBAR . After the conference, BuildersCloud received an investment of $ 1.1 million, like almost all startups participating in SVOD.





In general, with regard to trends, the conference participants noted that now it is: mobile applications and services, mobile advertising, cloud services (cloud computing), B2B startups, startups in the field of education. You can read more about trends in this article . However, it should be remembered that trends do not last long enough, so it is better to just find an acute problem that I would like to solve.



More videos and information about the Silicon Valley Open Doors conference .



To be continued



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