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.