The day before the Startup School 2007
We've been invited to a reception for speakers, press, and some of the attendees the night before Startup School. It was happening in Y Combinator's place in Mountain View, CA.
We decided to get a car for rent from Budget, but they screwed up and gave us an old Ford Taurus, which was too big for me and too fuel inefficient.
The drive was safe, but very boring.
It was very exciting when we've got closer to Silicon Valley and a lot of IT companies' buildings are showed up.
We stayed in the hotel Lodge, which is about 1 mile from the Y Combinator. I like beer and was pretty sure they should have some, so it wasn't worth driving.
Mountain View's downtown really sucks. Sorry, but it just a big village. We came from Pasadena, which is close to Los Angeles, and I thought that it's pretty boring place. I was very wrong.
We had a lunch before visiting Y Combinator and visited some Teriyaki place. It wasn't good at all. Unfortunetly, the sushi place which we found was closed and we should to wait for an hour before opening. That was really surprising that sushi restraunt is opening only after 5 pm.
The networking was cool. Well, I was really surprised that the most part of the people were thinking or already doing some startup, and the most ideas were not unique. The were trying to change something or to improve something minor, were too positive about hitting the market and sometimes too blind about competitors. Anyway, the most of them were pretty young, so my concerns are pretty understandable. I had a chance to meet and introduce myself to Jessica Livingston, the author of Founders at Work.
There were two robots. Pretty fun.
After some networking we decided to take a walk in some nice place. Unlikely, it was more then one hour drive to San Francisco, so we decided to visit San Jose. It's was really cool and we really liked it.
I've got some videos from the event. You can see them at http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=bosstalks They may not be available, yet, but as soon as YouTube updates the database, you'll see them there.