Silicon Where? (Part 2)

Other than visiting Michael Birch at Bebo, entrepreneurial landmarks that greeted us during the Silicon Valley trip included Google, Facebook and Crystal Towers – affectionately known as the “Y Scraper” since it has so many residents from the Y Combinator program.

Google stood out though – it recently beat McKinsey to #1 in Fortune magazine’s annual list of the top 100 MBA employers (arguably the most reputable ranking of employers available). With their gyms, games rooms, unlimited free exotic cuisine, campus environment and density of super-smart people working in sunny Mountain View, it’s not hard to understand why. Having been started up by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998, they’re now a $210bn company and are still growing fast 9 years later!

One of the Y Scraper’s residents and someone we spent a lot of time with was Sumon Sadhu, the Co-Founder of Imperial Entrepreneurs and Lightbox , and also a Board Member of Seedcamp. Last year I was introduced to Sumon by my (then) girlfriend and I like to think we’ve become pretty good entrepreneurial buddies since – we certainly share a lot of opinions on the European ecosystem and how it can be developed. Along with his co-founder Jamie Quint , Sumon was staying on the top floor of Crystal Towers, overlooking Alcatraz. Andy and I worked round at their apartment a few times during the week and also had the pleasure of attending a British Founders event which Sumon organised:

Left: Bob Goodson, Co-Founder, YouNoodle – a social network for student entrepreneurs
Centre: Andrew Davies, Co-Founder, Idiomag – a personalised digital music magazine
Right: Andy Young, my co-founder on ClickUni and GroupSpaces

Later on in the week, Sumon invited us to a Happy Dev Lunch at Facebook – an event focused around platform applications. We saw Mark Zuckerburg, and also bumped into Alex Tew, Creator of the MillionDollarHomepage – another British founder. The quality of conversation at the event was high, and unlike many events in Oxford or London, most of the attendees had a very good understanding of Web start-ups, raising funding and how it all fits together. I was fortunate enough to meet Eddie Codel, the Internet video producer and Co-Founder of GETV. We got talking and he really liked the vision for ClickUni. This resulted in him inviting us to be interviewed on the Podtech show LunchMeet:

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/08/PID_012104/Podtech_LM69_ClickUni.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/3775/lunchmeet-clickuni-manages-social-groups&totalTime=831000&breadcrumb=bdefae0f26e947bea65552b19ed251a1]

Andy and I both enjoyed shooting the video and it’s a nice souvenir to take home from the states. Cheers Eddie!