Silicon Valley Trip

Silicon Valley is home to many of the world’s largest technology companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, HP, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Oracle, Yahoo, Netflix, and EA. Last week was my third visit, but not to meet with any of the usual suspects.

Monday, October 25^th was my private meeting with Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools division at Microsoft. We met at Zibibbo, a pan-Mediterranean restaurant located in a renovated Victorian home. At the meeting were representatives of three other great companies, all of us members of Microsoft’s BizSpark One program: Dan Galperin of kobo, a global eBook retailer that believes consumers should be able to read any book, anytime, anywhere, and on the device of their choice; Micah Baldwin of Graphic.ly, an immersive social experience and marketplace around comic books; and Jeff Yoshimura of Zuora, a leader in subscription billing and recurring payments.

We each introduced our firms to Mr. Muglia, and discussed topics of specific interest to Microsoft. For Linxter, there was interest in how we are incorporating WebSockets into our cloud messaging platform. We then went on to chat about Azure, Microsoft’s cloud strategy and our experiences building solutions on it. At this meeting, Dan of kobo gave each of us an awesome gift; a Wi-Fi enabled kobo eReader preloaded with 100 books. This meeting was followed by dinner with a few of the Valley’s prominent venture capitalists, including Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Tuesday was another day of schmoozing and networking, complete with a private cocktail reception at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley office. The event marked the end of Microsoft’s annual VC Summit, and the opening of Microsoft’s BizSpark One Summit. I resisted the temptation to try and get my picture taken with both Muglia and Steve Ballmer, and instead spent my time trying to meet with each of the BizSpark One companies present, discussing potential business development opportunities. I spent some time with Sinclair Schuller and Devon Watson of apprenda. Our firms provide complementary solutions; whereas Linxter takes care of all the communication plumbing coding complexities, apprenda provides the foundation on which to build and deliver .NET based software as a service (SaaS) applications. Mike Sappington of gloStream and I chatted as well. We spoke about the merits of secure, reliable, durable messaging with non-repudiation as it related to his industry – providing an electronic medical records solution that meets legal compliance requirements.

Later that night, at an after-party in Mountain View, I continued several earlier conversations with Loic Le Meur and Mathieu Thouvenin of Seesmic, about reliable messaging, possible futures of several social networks, and identity management. Dr. Timothy Uy and Jim Hsia of loqu8 and I kept running into each other throughout the weekend and had several interesting conversation about contextual data relationships and artificial intelligence. Also present at the after-party were Mathew Clark, Christopher Griffin, Brian Johnson, Ludovic Ulrich, Brian Gorbett and Dave Drach of Microsoft, some of the hard-working people behind building the BizSpark One ecosystem of start-ups and emerging tech companies.

On Wednesday, Chris Shipley of Guidewire Group MC’ed the day. In addition to networking, the focus of the event, several interesting panels were held. There was a debate on the importance of start-ups being located in the Valley, and advice from Harald Horgen of The York Group, Lesley Gold of SutherlandGold Group, and others on marketing, sales and channel partner development.

For lunch that day, Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (“DFJ”) provided the entertainment by outlining his plan for colonizing Mars, followed by an energetic performance of The Risk Master. At my table was Margaret Johnson of Sabi games, Alexander Jorias of Club Cooee, Dan Galperin of kobo, and Rupert Young of Feeva. Topics at our table ranged from educational software games, virtual worlds, and eBooks, to collecting end-user demographics.

Tuesday ended with wine tasting and dinner at the Testa Rossa Winery, the event being sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank. On the way to the winery I chatted with Adriana Neagu of formotus, a mobile app development platform. We discussed distributed computing, the mobile phone OS market, and also the largely untapped market of highly educated and experienced women looking to return to the workforce on a part-time basis after temporarily putting their professional careers on hold to stay at home with children. I then chatted with C.V. Prakash of Gradatim, a micro transactions service provider in India. We discussed the growing role of Indian venture capital firms, the Business Process Utility (BPU) space and the value of cloud computing to better serve international markets.

On the ride back to Microsoft’s office, my friend Brian Johnson of Microsoft and I were discussing Paul Erdos, a well-known mathematician, while several members of Russia-based BizSpark One companies demonstrated their singing talent in the back of the bus. Brian made two book recommendations: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman, and Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. He asked if I was related to Stanley Milgram of the six degrees phenomenon mentioned in the book – he was my uncle – and we went on to discuss his obedience to authority experiments, which Brian’s son is now studying.

Thursday I attended PDC 2010 (Professional Developers Conference) via satellite link. The Cloud, Windows Phone 7 and IE9’s focus on HTML5 were the big topics of the day. The day also included several private meetings, including one with Clifford Reeves, General Manager of the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft. At the reception that followed the PDC 2010 event, Valli Kamakodu of OSIsoft, Brian Gorbett of Microsoft, and I engaged in a lengthy technical discussion on Azure and its role in the Smart Grid. I also discussed gaming and line-of-business app development on Windows Phone 7 with Bruno Terkaly of Microsoft and a number of others.

Early Friday morning I had a meeting with a new potential Linxter partner before heading to the airport. Heading back to South Florida, I began shuffling through the fifty-four business cards I had collected, reviewing business development notes I had taken, and wondering how I could include at least a few of the people I met in a blog post.

Now I’m back in the office, and I thought it’d be nice to share my experience and do a little shameless name dropping. While it was a very busy week, it was refreshing to be in such good company, geeking out on such an eclectic range of topics, from mathematic fundamentals, to the future of cloud computing, fine wines and even comic books.