Hey Everyone,
I’m in San Francisco this week for the Web 2.0 Summit. The Web 2.0 Summit is this big conference in San Francisco held each year. When I say big I don’t really mean big in the number of people that attend it because to be honest I’ve seen bigger audiences but that’s also probably because it’s an invite-only event (I was lucky to get an invite).
But when I say big, I mean big in the sense that they bring in the most powerful people in the tech scene to speak. In these two days alone, I have seen 4 technology billionaires speak and a lot of other very successful hundred millionaires. People that range from the Founders/CEOs of Google, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Linked-In, Adobe and every other huge significant player in the tech world was speaking at this conference. I will go into the details of each person maybe in the next entry.
I’ve always wanted to go to Silicon Valley to see what it’s like. It is after all the technological innovation hub of the world! All the huge tech companies have a base here. Everyone from Apple, Google, Facebook and etc etc. I never got a chance to go though or more like never really had an excuse to go. San Francisco is a little far to go for a holiday and besides apart from my New York trip this year, I haven’t really had much of a chance to go on a full-fledged holiday-only trip.
So when the invite for this conference came up, I decided to take a leap at it. So far I can tell you this whole trip was amazing. Not only from the conference but from the offices of the Silicon Valley companies I’ve visited and the people I’ve met.
It was a real eye-opener for me.
Let me give you a bit of an insight. As part of the conference today, they got young aspiring internet entrepreneurs to go up on stage and each were given some 2 minutes each to pitch their ideas to the crowd.
These people were all smart. They spoke well, carried themselves well and sold their ideas very well. You heard all sorts of ideas for all sorts of different web innovations that you have never even heard of. One of the guys went up on stage to pitch the idea of his new dotcom called Path.
It was an iPhone app that helped you share photos with up to 50 of your really close friends. Why 50 friends? Because he had some research done to find that we only really have a maximum of 50 really really close friends that we want to keep in touch with online.
Or there was a guy who had lost a close friend of his in a car accident and got inspired then to start a site to store our memories of someone’s life. He called it 1000 memories.
Or even this site called Tokbox that allowed you to communicate with each other via video much easier. There were a lot of other stuff. Other iPhone and Android apps (Android seems to be one of the most talked about subjects now with its growth) created by people to try to make our lives easier. I even saw one of the Founders of Meebo share a new feature of theirs that allowed you to share bookmarks or links by checking into websites FourSquare style. Point of that was to help you find people with similar interest of you.
And here’s the thing. This is going on EVERYWHERE in Silicon Valley. I was having dinner tonight with some people and overheard was some guy pitching his mobile app idea to someone else. . Walk around the conference area during break time and you see young entrepreneurs with laptops pitching their ideas to potential VCs, hoping to raise money to pursue their dream.
It’s everywhere! Everyone has a different idea and there are so many Venture Capitalists looking to invest in the next Facebook or Zynga. Silicon Valley has that energy of innovation. Everywhere you go there are people with ideas, people executing ideas and people looking to facilitate the execution of these ideas. Many of these ideas fail but some of them become multi-million or even billion dollar businesses in just a span of a few years. It’s crazy!
Here’s the funny thing though. Contrast to the internet companies in many other countries (even China), the companies that start here focus on PRODUCT first before making money. That in theory sounds really good because yes you want to perfect a product before you sell it or just like what Google did, perfected search before it found the way to monetize it.
That works fine in Silicon Valley because there are many VCs who are able to give you a lot of money to put all the resources you need together and give you the time to build a good product. All that without feeling too much of a pressure to make money first. So the result of that is that yes… in some cases they make some really good products. I’m not sure if this kind of thing works back in SouthEast Asia since the VCs back home aren’t able to give you that much money to be able to buy you this time.
Being here also really makes me realize how small we are in the grand scale of things. Take for example Baidu.
Robin Li the Founder of Baidu was at this conference too. Baidu has a market capitalization of $36.5 BILLION (RM114.39bn). None of the companies in Malaysia OR Singapore are even close to having that kind of stock market value. MayBank which is one of the biggest companies on the KL Stock Exchange only has a market cap of RM64.41.bn in comparison.
From this trip alone I feel like I have learned and experienced so much. What’s more important perhaps was the macro perspective that this trip to Silicon Valley has given me. I now look at life and business very differently.
In the next few days I will find the time to blog about the speakers who spoke at the conference and my visits to some of the offices of Silicon Valley companies that I was lucky to be able to visit while I was here. This afternoon I visited the Googleplex in Mountain View and took lots of pictures to share with you guys.
This trip has been a really busy but productive business trip. We’ve been so busy I just realized that I’ve never even had a chance to properly do touristy stuff or sight-see in San Francisco. Haven’t even seen the Golden Gate bridge. Oh well okay I gotta go to bed now guys. Tomorrow morning I’m going to visit Zynga, the creators of Farmville and one of the fastest growing games companies in the world.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space