Companies from Barcelona in the Silicon Valley

The first start ups from Barcelona have just landed at the Plug and Play Technology Center (Sunnyvalle, California). Futurlink, Justinmind and 3scale now have new offices located a couple of blocks from Google and Yahoo’s headquarters.

In order to welcome the start ups from BCN, Plug and Play organized a welcome seminar. The event aimed to analyze the challenges that young startups and entrepreneurs face, and to emphasize the importance of fostering a culture of innovation and spirit of entrepreneurship at the universities. The 2 day Acceleration and Collaboration Track was opened by Mateu Hernandez, Executive Director of Barcelona Activa and had the prestigious keynotes of Dan’L Lewin, VP of strategy and development at Microsoft, and Ron Conway, Founder of SV Angels.

During the first day several best practices had been analyzed: companies as Google, MySQL and Metacafe talked about their creation and development experiences; speakers from Stanford, Cornell, MIT and Harvard examined the best practices to foster entrepreneurship and help entrepreneurs at the universities; and the cases of Israel and Canada were explored to analyze how government and private incubators can assist entrepreneurs.

The second day of the seminar held a showcase where international startups exposed their opportunities in front of top angel investors and VCs –Wellington Partners, Northwest Ventures and DFJ. Futurlink and Justinmind participated in the 2 minute-extreme-pitch and did a good job explaining the differentiating features of their products.

The Current Economic Turmoil and the Entrepreneur – Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum

After the housing bubble in the US, Ireland, Spain and the UK, and after the default on mortgage loans at financial institutions, there are still many uncertainties about where additional losses will occur.

As a result, financial institutions are reluctant to make or to buy loans; insolvency risk raises the risk among firms; and fear of runs lead financial institutions to seek liquidity. Meanwhile Sequoia Capital’s R.I.P.: Good Times* is traveling around the world, causing entrepreneurs to fear that it is not the perfect time to seek VC funding.

The speakers at the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum agree that we are going through a “moment of extreme schizophrenia”. Limited partners are very stressed and this makes fund raising very difficult for GPs. Start ups that do not have revenues, will find it hard to get follow on rounds. From the investors’ point of view, now is perhaps the moment for making long term investments, always looking for very large returns.

However, “difficult times always create opportunities” and thus it can be a good moment for entrepreneurs to think of “making something out of nothing”. In the current global world, perhaps it is an opportunity to go to international investors for getting funding.

The future? It is not predictable. The results will be different than in 2000. Then, we suffered an equity crunch and now we are going through a credit crunch. Most likely after the crunch the situation will become more stable and clear, which means that the financial institutions and the loans will be carefully regulated.

* Sequoia Capital: R.I.P.: Good Times (http://www.slideshare.net/eldon/sequoia-capital-on-startups-and-the-economic-downturn-presentation?type=powerpoint)

Life as an Entrepreneur

The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at UC Berkeley offers a seminar for its MBA students which has the goal of discussing the ups and downs, pros and cons of the entrepreneurship. The lectures are given by entrepreneurs who have “been there”.

Every Tuesday an experienced entrepreneur is invited to this Life as an Entrepreneur seminar to talk about how they created something out of nothing: searched for an opportunity, became passionate about an idea, searched for resources and launched in the market. They explain how their organizations were created and share the lessons they learned. Additionally, the class participates in active group discussion of a new venture idea facilitated by the student coordinators with the input and guidance of the guest speaker and/or second year MBA students with relevant industry experience.

The interesting part of this MBA course is that students at the Entrepreneurs Association lead. They are responsible to select the speakers and make the arrangements to have them talk about their experiences. After the class a small group of students has the opportunity to share a dinner with the speakers.

In the first weeks of this Fall Semester 2008 some very interesting entrepreneurs have been invited to talk about their personal experiences. This speaker series was opened by Will Price who is the CEO of Widgetbox. Will talked about his professional transition from a VC firm to his current position. He moved from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners –a VC firm specialized in seed and Series A investments of SaaS, opensource, on-line video and consumer web companies- to Widgetbox which is a San Francisco-based start up which enables people to find, make and distribute web widgets for blogging, social networking services, and personal websites. His experience as a VC gave him the opportunity to learn the best practices of the start up process.

In a next session Bambi Francisco (in the picture), Founder and CEO of vator.tv used the information of her interviews with entrepreneurs to list 10 key pieces of advice to start a new company. Vator.tv is a useful internet tool which consists of short videos of interviews with managers of the most innovative and important companies in the Silicon Valley. The interviews are done by the founder Bambi herself who worked as journalist at Dow Jones MarketWatch.

Another interesting speech was the one given by Dean Drako, co-founder, president and CEO of Barracuda. Dean explained all the steps of his entrepreneurial career started in 1998 with Design Acceleration, Inc. –acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 1998- and followed by Boldfish - acquired by Siebel Systems in 2003- and Velosel Corporation.

Follow the series at http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events.php?group=A.+Richard+Newton+Distinguished+Innovator+Lecture+Series