Silicon Valley tells London: Be original and open your kimono
Investors and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley met with more than 300 tech company CEOs at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London last Saturday. Organised by LinkedIn's co-founder Reid Hoffman and investor Sherry Coutu, the 'Silicon Valley Comes to the UK' conference was the perfect end to a series of tech and entrepreneurship focused events happening over the past two weeks, which also included the European tech awards The Europas and the Prime Minister's visit to Tech City. Hoffman opened the conference with these words: "Entrepreneurship is throwing yourself off a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down." By the response, many of the attendees were already in a free fall.
At the North Greenwich arts college, Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs agreed on two main recommendations for European start-ups. The speakers repeatedly urged European start-up founders to be original instead of emulating the US and take advantage of some of the areas where Silicon Valley can't compete: music, culture, financial services and fashion. Already we are seeing these areas explored by several successful European start-ups and there is so much more potential, advised several of the speakers.
The second main message of the tech filled day was well articulated by Hans-Peter Brøndmo, director of social experience group at Nokia: "Open your kimono," he urged. His suggestion, shared by many others, was that European start-ups need to be less protective of their ideas and start talking more, sharing ideas, collaborating and helping each other. It's one of the things that has made Silicon Valley such a great ecosystem. In Europe, attendees agreed, most people don't want to share what they are working on, they're worried that someone will steal their idea. One of the panellists, DJ Patil from Graylock, would like to see more interaction and asked the Tech City to consider organising more hackathons. To hammer the point home VCs and angel investors added: "We are not in the business of stealing ideas."
From engineering to design
Silicon Valley comes to the UK was hosted at an arts college for a reason. Many of the most successful companies of today are design companies with excellent engineering, a major change over the past few years. Previously, as Matthew Hawn of Last.fm pointed out, tech companies were first about engineering and the design was something added at the end to make 'things look good'. Nowadays, design is absolutely essential and excellent engineering is expected. "We started as an engineering company and became design led," Hawn cited his own firm as an example.
DNA of an entrepreneur: have you lost it?
Tech editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe Ben Rooney led a discussion on the DNA of an entrepreneur. What stuck with me was a view expressed by angel investor Ali Partovi who claimed that everyone is born an entrepreneur. In his view some of us lose the entrepreneurial drive when we are growing up. We stop being curious, wanting to take risk and as another panellist Raj Kapoor noted we are no longer ignorant (or less so). Ignorance is an important trait of an entrepreneur, Kapoor said. You do things that other tried and failed, but oftentimes you succeed. If you knew someone else already failed, you might have never tried. Keeping some traits from childhood might not be a bad thing after all. So, keep jumping off the cliff.