Bridges to Silicon Valley from other countries

Spent the last couple of days at an interesting conference called Incubate 2.0, organized by Startup Cause. The idea was to discuss how various initiatives to “help entrepreneurs” might collaborate/work together/learn from each other. 

One of the discussions was about Bridge organizations from places like Ireland, Australia, Mexico etc that bring entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley to “experience it”. When I got back to my office, there was this report about Bridge organizations in my in box (from the incubator Plug and Play). It makes for some interesting background for anyone interested in this topic.

At the conference, I expressed the opinion that, while these initiative are certainly very useful, I felt that in some ways the real cutting edge ideas were now about starting global, and staying global. Having lived in Silicon Valley for 30 years, I think it’s very interesting to see just how many exciting things are starting to happen elsewhere. And how the new technologies allow us to harness global human capital in ways that just were not possible even ten years ago. Could we be moving to a “post Silicon valley world” (if you think in terms of 10-20 year time cycles)?

My favorite initiatives at Incubate 2.0 were all global:

• GrowVC: crowd funding;
• Quickstart Global: how to create a global corporate footprint from the start, while outsourcing things like hr and real estate; and (of course :))
• Acceleration Co-op: tapping into an expert crowd (drawn from all around the world) to get help, advice, and market insights.