We launched in April 2007 and TechCrunch50 did the same thing after summer 2007. There was only one difference between them and us: they were showing American startups and we were giving a chance to European ones. Result: they were profitable and we were not. Probably their startups were also much better, but this is difficult to measure. In any case, please, Mr. Arrington, give us a small recognition

Taylor Norris talked about Govit, a platform to put citizens in touche with their representatives, which is using Facebook Connect:

Chris Turitzin talked about DropPlay, a social media player that plays music on Facebook:

David Neubauer talked about NutshellMail, a tool that aggregates your social life and sends it thru email:

John Anderson talked about GroupCard, a collective greating card site which works as a Facebook app:

Leo Hochberg talked about Runthere.com, a social fitness application which he’s founded together with his wife:

These are some of the reasons that explain what happens in Silicon Valley:

1. VCs (money), lawyers and technologists are constantly getting together in many different ways. Yes, corporate lawyers are fundamental here. Technologists are the big innovators. You can not create anything new in Silicon Valley without a passion for technology. And these people have it and sometimes they even know how to make money out of it, which is just the point in which a new startup can grow. The good thing is that at that point in time they will probably have a lawyer and a VC really close.

2. Being an entrepreneur is very easy in Silicon Valley. There are many people like you and the economic system favors entrepeneurship. As an example, you can freely lay people off in California, while in Europe you have to really think twice before hiring anybody, as it is really expensive to lay him/her off. At the same time, while in Europe working in a startup is not so “cool”, here it’s just what everybody wants to do. And this ecosystem is attracting entrepreneurs from all around the world.

3. Love for risk. Everything here encourages people to take risks and this same risky behaviour pushes everybody else to just be like that. Risk is part of Silicon Valley’s culture. And risk is fundamental in high tech, as you need it in order to be the best in your field. As of risk and failure, it’s very interesting to see this video of Noah Kagan, who has a very interesting record of failures and is quite satisfied of what he’s learnt this way:

4. High goals. It’s pretty much related to risk taking. People here are very ambitious. Everybody wants to make “the next thing”. And everybody knows that focus is fundamental in order to find a new market in which they can become leaders, as it is the leader the one who gets 80% of the value of every market. On the opposite, most entrepreneurs in Europe are so conservative that our main goal is to make a life out of our business. Fast growth is encouraged. Not because of some type of short-term thinking but because it’s the only way to avoid competitors becoming bigger than you and to get the best exit (sale or IPO). Being fast is once again a clue in making money out of innovation.

5. Nature and weather. Silicon Valley is one of the best places on Earth to live. Its weather (dry but not too warm) is just great. The surrounding nature makes this one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It’s just very easy to convince people to move here.

6. Talent. Where on Earth can you find the most talented engineers and product designers? Nowhere. It’s true they are very expensive, but they are also pretty flexible and they don’t care working in a startup. They know that’s going to be their best opportunity to become rich.

7. Mix of cultures. Silicon Valley is a place in which you don’t feel strange being a foreigner. Why? Because 50% of the people are from abroad. There are plenty of Indians and Asians working on IT companies in Silicon Valley. Many of these foreigners (Sergey Brin himself) have become succesful tech entrepreneurs.

If you want to know more about the history of Silicon Valley this video is just great:

That explains why Mark Zuckerberg moved from Harvard to the Stanford outskirts when he realized that the site was starting to grow really quickly. Google was born as a research project at Stanford, where Sergey Brin and Larry Page were doing their Phd. SUN and Cisco have a lot to do with the Stanford’s private network being used commercially.

Even the Internet, the first ARPAnet, was born here, as Stanford was one of the 4 universities that first got connected. This university is right in the center of Silicon Valley and I think its existance is one of the main reasons why the Silicon Valley is here and not somewhere else.

If you want to know more about the relationship between Stanford, the US Military and Silicon Valley, this video is very interesting. It highlights the role of Frederick Terman, who encouraged David Packard and Bill Hewlett to create HP (Hewlett Packard) and later became dean of engineering:

And the presentation:

BTW, even Steve Jobs considers Stanford the best university in the world:

Text found at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View: “When two Stanford graduates, William Hewlett and David Packard, decided to form their own company, Stanford professor Fred Terman gave them facilities on campus and loaned them $500. Hewlett-Packard (HP) became a model for productive links between industry and academia. In its early days, the company relied on defense contracts and later moved into the civilian electronics field. HP developed a reputation for excellence in its contruction of electronic test equipment, which nearly every other electronics company needed and relied upon to design and build its own products. In the 1980s, HP came to dominate the global laser printer market and now is a major computer manufacturer.

Perhaps most important to Silicon Valley culture however, was the hands-on leadership of Packard and Hewlett. Under their management philosophy, known as the “HP Way”, employees are assumed to be honest, hard-working and possessing a genuine desire to do good work; in return the company offers rewards such as profit-sharing, flexible hours and telecommuting.”

Sudha Jamthe is probably the greatest of Silicon Valley’s networkers. She organizes Facebook and Twitter Applications Meetups in Mountain View and Palo Alto. People share their twitter and facebook apps and get feedback from other app developers and entrepreneurs.

Perrine Crampton is lately co-organizing these meetups with Sudha Jamthe. Both make a great team and their meetups were great! Something funny happened with Parrine, as I happened to know her cousin before her.

Shirley Lin is another great friend. She organizes an Entrepeneurs’ Roundtable every month in Palo Alto and also helps in many other meetups, specially with her camera. What I like the most of her meetups is that there is no bullshit, as she asks speakers to talk about their failures.

Catherine Burton organizes every month the WebMapSocial Meetup in which social apps and mashups are shown in Googleplex:

Wesley Barrow is organizing the San Francisco New Media Drinkup every month in San Francisco.

Daya Baran and Reshma Kumar work for Silicon Valley WebGuild and also organize Startup Idol, a contest for startups:

1. There are very weak party organizations. In fact, even though the Democratic elites supported Hillary Clinton, Obama won the primaries.

2. There are independent candidates and campaigns, which can not happen in Europe, where the political elites (people who work for the parties) control mostly everything, including who becomes the candidate.

3. Electoral politics is professionalized in the US. In fact, a group of political consultants have been helping candidates for many years. Mainly with technical practices relating to broadcast media and, lately, to new media. Obama got a great group of independent e-politics consultants to help him.

4. Fundraising can be done independently, without the mediation of political parties. This is one of the most important things that Obama got during his campaign, specially thanks to the Internet, where he raised several million dollars. In Europe, as we all know, money comes originally from bank loans, which gives a bigger chance to the main political parties.

5. The importance of media is higher in the US, because public opinion plays a bigger role. This has been taken to new media.

6. Huge data bases were used in the elections to track which people should be called to move them to vote in certain states. This would not have been possible in Europe, where privacy laws are very restrictive.

7. In the US lots of vounteers are needed to help during the long campaigns. It’s not so easy to mobilize people in Europe, where politics does not have a good image.

8. Last but not least. Before Obama there was Howard Dean, who used more or less the same tools but failed to become the Democratic candidate in 2004. Social networks, blogs and meetup were already there. Besides, Dean’s 5 main campaign advisors created a company, Blue State Digital, after 2004. This company built MyBarackObama.com and one of its founders is Joe Rospars, New Media Director for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for President. They also built some online tools for civic action and social networks as Democracy for America.

This is a great video that shows how relevant Obama is in Silicon Valley:

AdMob, the company in which Ali Diab, the guy who said that SMS are going to die, works as VP of Product, is making a lot of money with mobile ads. There were also some interesting thoughts about how digital products are starting to be sold on mobile platforms. Nothing too different from what happens on the fixed Web. By the way, Orange has admitted losing revenues from SMS messages in Spain because of the competition from social networks.

So here is the interview I made with Kate Imbach, the organizer of this event. She came all the way from Boston!

What happened last Wednesday in a workshop titled “PR Buzz for Early-Stage Startups“, in the fbFund’s offices in Palo Alto, is a good example of this. I admire Jeremiah Owyang for his sage blogging, and also enjoyed listening to PR consultant Jeremy Toeman and Clara Shih, who has just published a book about Facebook. But half of what they said was bullshit. “It’s hard to come across as authentic if you promote a revolution that you personally stand to benefit the most from”, as Scott Berkun pointed out a month ago.

Owyang admitted that, as a marketing tool, blogging is dead as people don’t trust these blogs, though he advised companies to write corporate blogs for news (?). Of course online marketing has become social media marketing with some SEO (not so popular any more). And of course people trust each other more than they trust advertising. We all knew that!

But the entrepreneurs over there were waiting for somebody to tell them what to do to launch their products and all they got were nice words and an advice to check in a PR agency. No way! As most successful net companies have shown, there are two things that you have to do in house: technology and public relations. You can outsource the rest.

The best PR campaign starts having the best product. You need that first. Secondly, you need to have good bloggers, twitter and Facebook users. They will promote your product better than any agency. You will also have to be able to explain it to VCs and potential partners. And they know a lot about that here in the Valley. Sure! I have heard the word pitch about 10 times every single day I was here.

But don’t outsource your PR. You need the best “social engineers” to do this job for you and they should stay with you! You should actually do this. And don’t hype twitter. It’s one of the tools, but blogs, Facebook apps, contests should also be taken into account. Get some help if you need it, but do not outsource the whole thing.

BTW, if you want to be on TechCrunch, think about getting Michael Arrington angry. The people from 23andme did so with their zeppelin (see video underneath) and the guys from Fleck woke him up in his house two years ago (see video underneath). Also, the founder of FatSecret followed him for 30 minutes to do a short pitch. But is it so important to get a post on TechCrunch?

Kenneth Young wrote a more formal report on the event at fbFund.

I arrived with a very old car, so I felt quite out of place from the very first moment. Already knowing some people in the valley helped me to not feel so bad later on I remember talking to Dave Mathews, Yossi Vardi, Cathy Brooks, David Hornik, Barak Berkovitz, Brent Tworezky, Javier Oliván, Deb Schultz, Shahar Nechmad, Hugh McLeod, iJustine (so so blonde), Steve Katz, Leigh Varney, DJ Patil, Nitin Borwankar, Ethan Gahng, Josh Breinlinger, David Hassell, Greg Biggers, Darius Dunlap and many others whose names I don’t remember any more. I could not shake hands with Michael Arrington and could not get to see Loic and Geraldine Le Meur.

The elite of Silicon Valley was there. This is a very closed environment, though. Somehow similar to the one you find in country clubs in most European cities. The only difference is that while in Europe the environment is related to more traditional industries, here it’s made out of successful and almost successful Internet entrepreneurs. I am sure I would have won the contest for the most horrible mobile phone

Two more interesting data about this party: it was over at 9.30 pm, which is really early. Even Germans from DLD know that the best parties start after midnight. Another difference with European events is that everybody was going home by car, which is not the best idea if vodka and wines have been served generously. Luckily, there were no cops around (weird, when you learn that the State of California is almost bankrupt) and the permitted blood alcohol concentration is 0.08 (twice the one in most countries in Europe).

This is a short video I took over there:

Photos: Mathieu Ramage and Techcrunch