Day 1 in Silicon Valley — Oh, the places you’ll go!
Midnight came and we walked in some minutes ago to our “new house” for the upcoming week. Monday was a great day to gather us all and waking up at 6AM was a challenging team building activity (most of the team was dealing with jetlag and lack of sleep). After leaving the hotel two hours later we started driving to SV, joined two conference calls on the highway and got here at 2pm.
Staying in the Rainbow Mansion is a rare and cool experience. The vibe is extremely particular; NASA engineers and Google software developers that fill boards with physics problems and are into recycling are the permanent residents of this house. Then you can find smaller groups of temporal residents who would stay for periods of three months or less like us.
The first meeting was at the VMware campus in Palo Alto. Karina Fernandez, an Argentine who has been based in the States (but made the most of the ‘remote friendly’ policy and traveled several times to Africa, Tailandia and Argentina in the meantime) for more than 20 years. She focused on the importance of social skills, education and women, plus seizing opportunities. Not only you need to do things well, but also to understand how to expose your work and be connected enough to reach who you want to reach. In addition she showed us the role mentoring across generations play to potentiate ideas and make them scale (or fail).
After that we had the chance to have dinner with Fernando Franco, Executive Director of PuenteLabs. He is a Mexican entrepreneur in his forties who basically connect people form Latin America with the Silicon Valley ecosystem. The meeting was also relaxed, and he gave us a lot of advice based on what he has seen mentoring and connecting with entrepreneurs in the area over the last 5 years. He pointed out the necessity of going global if you want to scale, the dichotomy between scaling business and lifestyle business, and the importance of taking care of yourself (specially if you are the founder).
There are some highlights of the day I want to share with you. Yes, my eyes are closing (sorry if my publication does not make sense it’s late) but ideas are fresh and please agree with me, that is what counts.
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Social skills really matter. Social networks have changed the way we stay in touch, yes. Have they changed the way people connect? No. Remote work has opened a new world of possibilities in terms of being-where-you-want and that changed the style but not the concept itself.
Decide what you want to do. Do you wanna go global? Do you want to practice choir every day? There is no right or wrong answer here, even in SV. Just decide your priorities.
Prepare to be lucky. You never know when things happen. Got several examples of this throughout the day.
Education is the key to get rid of mental barriers. This includes creating equal opportunities both for men and women, getting a global perspective and making mental colonialism disappear.
Culture is an important part. Change how we judge ideas (instead of no, try the “Yes, and…”) and start collaborating. Together we can go further.
The team is essential to run a project successfully. You just can not do it on your own.
Big companies are fighting for talent retention. They get it but a great part leaves before the first year. Stops, flexibility and horizontalization are some of the strategies mentioned.
Take care of yourself. If you want to put all your energy in a project, startup, company, NGO, whatever, you need to be balanced and find what keeps your feet on the ground. If you do not do it, you are wasting yourself and the company/project too.
Hope to publish tomorrow too!
Thanks!
