How a startup has a good time in Silicon Valley

Prehistory
Almost two years ago, I went to Silicon Valley in search of a new level of development, new interesting niches for business and new partners. Also, being in Yekaterinburg, I felt the glass ceiling, which prevented me from developing. In the end, I decided to go to the Valley and wrote about my stay there in the blog Conquest of California . Even then I didn’t know that I would face the problems that all new startups and programmers coming here will encounter, which I will discuss in this post.

Problem
You arrive at San Francisco airport, rent a car, book a hotel, and absolutely do not understand what to do next. From across the ocean, it seems that it is enough to come to the Valley, and brilliant thoughts on business development, on self-development, on time management and on ways to make a lot of money will make sense of you, but this does not happen. If you already have a project, then you continue to cut it, but it does not shoot despite the spell of this wonderful place.

How does most
Most, like me, came to the Valley and start knocking on all the doors in a row. You go to conferences, if you find out about someone on meetup.com and about eventbrite.com and in a few months you realize that 90% of all the parties are bullshit. Yes, there you can meet creative and interesting guys, but most often they go there just because they have not found a decent job for themselves. What can they advise you? Speeches are interesting, but they can almost always be found on the net. At start-up parties, they pitch for the sake of pitches, and I have never seen such a pitch end with a serious investment. The whole world says that the Valley is filled with Zuckerbergs and there is one of the biggest densities of dollar millionaires in the World, but you travel every day on 101 or 280 highways that lie between San Jose and San Francisco, you peer into the neighboring cars, but you don’t see these millionaires and get upset.
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Consequences
If you got to the Valley, it would seem to have stepped in the right direction, if you believe the rumors and methods, but is this the right direction for you and how many hundreds more miles does it take to understand this? I also often met people who took this first step into the Valley, and then locked themselves in a beautiful apartment with a swimming pool and sun, which shines 320 days a year, sawed the project, which was brought from Russia, but everything flows very sluggishly. In my apartment, while I traveled to Russia, there were programmers who, like me, came to conquer California, but in fact for a month did not get to know anyone, doing their usual Russian affairs. Naturally, they had a very neutral impression of the trip. Anyway, being in the Valley really means nothing. Many have been living there for decades, but they have not achieved any significant results, but someone does not start a startup or IT business at all, strange, isn't it ?!

Causes of the problem
Until 1697, it was believed that swans are only white, but the Dutch expedition, led by Willem de Vlaminck, found a population of black swans in Western Australia. According to Taleb, all significant scientific discoveries, historical and political events, achievements of art and culture are the Black Swans. Computer, Internet, Facebook - all are black swans, which are very easy to talk in hindsight, but which can not be predicted. For obvious reasons, it is in Silicon Valley that the vast majority of Black Swans are born in the field of startups, which cannot be predicted in advance from outside. As long as you do not know the rules of the game of Silicon Valley or any other ecosystem, you cannot fully play this game, which means you cannot make a qualitative race, create a megaproject for which you came to Silicon Valley. 99% of the projects that are brought there are either already done or not needed by anyone. To understand this, you need to be on the spot, to know what doors to knock, to understand whether you need to knock on them and assume what kind of response can be obtained. It is also important to be able to receive constant feedback from specialists who have already achieved some significant results in your area in order to correct the business model in time, change the product, make a pivot. It takes months and even years to find the right doors, as well as understanding the movement of trends and making the right acquaintances, and this is a real problem. Plus to this is added our Russian closeness, which often makes it difficult to interact with the outside world.

The true value of the Valley
Silicon Valley is in fact very multifaceted and multilayered so that all attempts to repeat its structure were unsuccessful. There are other places like Tel Aviv and Singapore that recreate some of its facets, but only a few. It seems to me that its true value or even physical quality is the attraction of other values: money, ideas, entrepreneurs, start-ups, funds, institutions, companies. As if a magnet attracts here all the blessings of the planet and one of the most important is People. In the Valley, you can very easily meet a person from Russia, whom you would never reach while being at home, despite the fact that you can live in the same city. In the Valley, this is done at the click of a finger. All speak the same language and are in a state of flux. At the exit after a noisy party, there may be several new partnerships and even projects, the main thing is to be in the right company. New connections acquired in the Valley are very strong and often move around the world with people, opening up new opportunities for you.

How to effectively spend time in the Valley
Based on the problems outlined above, I wrote several recommendations that helped me, and in my opinion, can help start-ups and entrepreneurs coming to the Valley, although they, of course, do not cover all aspects of effectively spending time in the Valley. These items are:

1. Expansion of the social graph
Establishing the maximum number of connections with successful entrepreneurs who are able to discover for you insiders, new patterns of behavior, working patterns. To establish interaction with them can help some intermediate acquaintance, because successful entrepreneurs very rarely go to public events. You need to somehow get into a closed get-together and become “yours”. By the way, one of the best nearest parties, which attracts many successful Russian- speaking entrepreneurs, is SVOD .

2. Excursions to IT companies
Visiting large IT companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn with a friend who works there. You can learn a lot of interesting about the rules of work in the same Google and something to adopt. Such information is not publicly available, unlike Google’s food, which feeds half of the Valley.

3. Individual expert advice
A lawyer, an accountant, an investor, a financial consultant can be very useful for solving the set tasks if they advise you or your group.

4. Contact with aspiring entrepreneurs
Beginners, but active entrepreneurs may also be useful in the future. Many of those who played poker and volleyball with us 1-2 years ago in the Valley during this time received millions of investments for projects, someone finished the accelerator, or is passing it now. Nutrient environment of the Valley makes you constantly move.

5. Visiting incubators and accelerators
There are hundreds of them in the Valley, so each one can draw something for oneself, especially if you find friends who are being incubated there.

6. Participation in hackathons
Hackatons allow you to meet new people, validate your idea and, if lucky, win a prize. I have a friend who constantly wins a very large number of Hackathons, passing in the Valley. If you follow this area, I think you know it too.

7. Private parties
As a rule, private parties are much better than public parties. But first you need to go through point 1 to find friends who will invite you there.

8. Organization of own events
Also very effective is the organization of its own events. We had one Startup BBQ, second, third. Then businessmen from all over the Valley began to ask when the next one, because such events really help entrepreneurial jelly cook, giving rise to new values: someone found an order, someone got a job in an incubator, someone created a new project with a new acquaintance etc.

9. Frequency and dynamics
It’s not enough to go to a hackathon or IT community once every 3 months; you need to do this periodically by constantly expanding your social graph and updating your understanding of innovations and trends. In this regard, it is better to spend 2 intensive weeks every six months than to stretch these visits for long months.

10. Action
Unfortunately, 90% of people never move from words and thoughts to actions. Anyone who comes up with a way to deal with this problem will obviously make a lot of money.

What's next
If you hooked on any of the above points, and you soon plan to be in Silicon Valley in the near future, then join the program that we developed specifically to solve the above-mentioned problems. This is a two-week intensive course, which contains more than 40 private events for entrepreneurs that allow you to quickly plunge into the Valley, get acquainted with entrepreneurs, investors, visit Google, Facebook, Evernote and other IT companies, talk with teachers from Stanford University and combine informal party in the jacuzzi or volleyball on the beach of Santa Cruz with work. This is not a tourist program, but real intensive two working weeks, which for someone will turn into a charge of energy in the coming months, a new vision, and possibly a Black Swan.