Our startup had the privilege of traveling to San Francisco to learn about Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial environment

Thanks to the program YUZZ for young people with innovative ideas, we were able to travel to the birthplace of entrepreneurship. Together with another 49 winners from all over Spain, we have visited companies, business incubators and business accelerators. We have also attended university speeches and networking events. It was a very intense week, and we had to take it very seriously in order to comply with the expected agenda. We started from the beginning, visiting the garage where the startup movement was created in Palo Alto and where HP conceived the first region dedicated to technology (Silicon Valley).

After this, we saw great examples: we visited Google, Facebook and the recent LinkedIn. We learnt about the importance of corporative culture and goals, as well as visiting their enormous campuses. We also had the privilege of getting to know some Spanish entrepreneurs that had achieved to have a career in USA. They gave us great advice and we had the chance to speak with them about the different ways of entrepreneurship in Spain and San Francisco. Apart from visiting Stanford University, we attended a wonderful speak given by one of its teachers and another presentation from Steven Hoffman, CEO of the Founders Space business accelerator. Here, we learnt that we must “search for excelence, because “good” always fails”.

In order to experience how an american-style networking event really is, we were taken to Live Shark Tank. We had already been warned about San Francisco: your pitch is your business card, your LinkedIn profile is the best way to make contacts, and everyone is an entrepreneur here! We need to point out that, apart from working, we were able to do some sightseeing: we visited Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and Twin Peaks.

San Francisco is a wonderful city that flows at a very accelerated pace, and we learned a lot of thing that we will put into practice at PTERODACTIVE.

When we got back to Spain, the whole team met up in Madrid for the awards ceremony. We are super satisfied with the winners, and after all the whole process we have been able to get to know them and their projects, and we are sure that they are going to go very far. The best aspect of this entrepreneur adventure was the people we shared it with, and we know that the winners as well as the special prizes Fintech and Mujer are going to attract lots of attention because they are real fighters!