Valley of smart things
Swiss army knives for startuppers visiting to America
You might push something but in 2019 it is not worth starting anything but by hacking. It is acutely valid in the world of startup, where if a major connection (investor, advisor, lawyer, …) has a request, we don’t have days to reply. Sometimes it is a matter of seconds to reach success and by this I mean literally seconds. Here comes a story about this, it happened last night at the meetup.
If somebody comes to the Valley, they must have arranged meetings. But sometimes there are several days between two meetings. It is obvious that one needs to look around but my advice is to download the Meetup and Eventbrite applications on the mobile phones before you come here. The point of both applications is that they search for meetups in places around your whereabouts, in the topic of your startup.
Yesterday, thanks to Eventbrite, I happened to come across the Angel investor* company meetup, where it was guaranteed to have a room full of Angel investors. The admission fee to an event like that — if you want to introduce your company — is nearly $2000 (!!!). You can go in as audience, of course, for $20 and while you are in there, having pizza and coke for free, you are hoping to bump into a potential investor.
*The Angel investor companies exactly aim to support and finance startups, often based on an idea supported by figures, in order to have their multiplied share in the company back afterwards — this is the “exit”.
I think we live in the best location of Palo Alto, it takes us only 15 minutes to get to the spot …by bike. All it costs is a Walmart bike, 100 dollars, this money could have been burnt in 3–4 days by Uber, so we are much better off.
By the way, I spotted the event at the last minute, out of a sudden flush. The point is that
we were there in the middle of Stanford, in a cool building of an investor company.
Amazingly we arrived in time, because if you were up to snuff, you could have a 5 minute presentation on their project in front of an audience without any tool (projector, PowerPoint).
We watched two lectures one after another, one on cannabis, another on health issues and Gábor managed to speak about ENVIENTA.
The result: the opportunity itself could have been worth a couple of thousand dollars and also the fact, that we were able to watch the reactions and listen to the questions we got. The road is almost never straight.
From the aspect of gaining experience I regard last night’s event as valuable, plus we got connections with a blockchain legal expert and an investor, we are going to see them later.
If you would like to follow or participate in the ENVIENTA project, come and join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1549322302054465/
