With the sun in our face & the wind in our hair, we entered Stanford University with Professor Tom Kosnik, all excited about the day ahead and all the cool people we will be meeting. Tom was really nice, taking time off from his busy schedule, not just to bring us around Stanford and SIlicon Valley this few days, but also to connect us to exciting startups and important people who could be really valuable to us next time when we start up our own company.

The first few thoughts that striked me upon entering Stanford include the vast area its campus spans, the many cyclists on the roads, and just like NUS, there are a lot of construction everywhere on campus. Unlike Harvard and Yale, most faculty buildings in Stanford are rather new and modernistic, lacking the touch of timeliness that the other two portrays. Yet, on closer look, I realized that Stanford is not impressive just for the number of smart and talented individuals that it produces yearly. What is really impressive and inspiring is the culture and ecosystem that is inculcated in each and every Stanford student. Values that promotes the sharing of ideas, giving a fair chance to everyone regardless of differences, and the importance of giving back to your community. Also, unlike the culture back home, the value of “daring to fail”, something that is taken for granted here, that we do not often get back home. It is amazing how new start-ups which have much to fear due to its instability is so open and willing to share with each other their ideas & innovation. This is unlike in Singapore, and in fact most of Asia, where people are comparatively more secretive and protective of their innovations and ideas. Many of the faculty buildings are even built by successful entrepreneurs! Founders of Hewlette & Package, Microsoft, Yahoo, just to name a few, invested their profits back into the school that raise them. This provided students with even more opportunities to innovate and become successful. The whole ecosystem and close social networking between successful entrepreneurs and how they give back to their community & school by helping start-ups is just awesome!

Then, there was the really informative and cool clean tech sharing session with the Founders of Get-it. Not being a technologically inclined person, I never knew that going green can be that cost effective and the best thing? You don’t really have to sacrifice your quality of life! In Liana’s (she’s a Singaporean too! How cool is that!) words, “you don’t have to go back to cavemen life to go green”.  All that’s required is the committment to go green, and the subsequent effort to adjust production and end products to change the place into a smart city, a smart building etecetera and better align it to clean technology.

The tour at Stanford was then concluded by Ooshma’s really inspiring sharing session. The fact that she is a young lady, fresh out of school and yet she has already started a company with paying pilot clients on board made it really easy for me to relate to her experience. Personally, being trained in Singapore, with emphasis on getting funding from VC, government or even angels to startup, sourcing for funding has become such a natural part of starting up for me. But Ooshma’s experience gave me a wake up call, and showed me that funding might not be all that fantastic at times. Sometimes, bootstrapping might not be that bad either. Bootstrapping allows you to have greater control of your equities, and at the same time, makes you more independent of other people’s money.

It would definitely be even more exciting tomorrow, when we visit investment companies, like Maples Investments, a angel investor company, and Apple store! Can’t wait!