The day started with a lovely stanford tour headed by Prof Tom Kosnik. He introduced us to the history & orgins of various places in Stanford university. It was spacious, the weather was good and we all enjoyed the summer breeze. Following the tour was 3 speakers, Laina, Annamaria and Oosma who shared their experiences in start-up companies. I was taken back by oosma courage and perserverance in her current company. She left me with deep thoughts on survival of the company using boot-strapping. Its the first that i’ve heard of so far. The other 2 speakers briefly mentioned about the importance of clean technology that will impact our future (e.g 20 years down the road). It was a heart-warming experience overall and i’ve gained more knowledge and insights about the survival of an entrepreneur. This taught me the traits of a successful entrepreneur and the setbacks that they’ve encountered.

The second day started with a big bang at IDEOS. We were greeted by a huge round-like sofa that is parially enclosed and bicycles hanging freely on the ceiling . The space provided for the staff at IDEOS was fabulous, from prototyping in workshops to working in van placed in the office to casual conversations at the pantry and backyard, everything just fits perfectly into an ideal working environment. As compared to the tradition of working from a proper office desk and dressed up formally, the latter proved that these changes pathed the way to innovations. Next up: We visited Mike from maple investments. He shared with us his strategy of choosing how to invest in a start- up company. I’ve learnt that its important to know how huge your target market is before investing in the company. Also, he told us to always that start-ups should be different, and not better than the current techology. Due to time constraints, we were unable to explore further burning questions that we wanted to ask. I’m inspired by the mike’s motivation of risk taking.

Lastly, we ended off the session at nanosolor. Technical as the presentation was, i’ve picked up a few engineering technologies and terminologies. There was a discussion session after dinner and all of us was given a chance to give our opinions on the ecosystem in silicon valley and in Singapore. I felt that it was difficult to bring silicon valley ecosystem in Singapore as most business man sticks to the traidtional norms of operating a company. Besides cultural difference plays a huge part in changing the ecosystem locally. In time to come, i would vision to see Singapore being a mini silicon valley where entrepreneurs meets, share ideas and sharing a common goal; to cultivate more young entrepreneurs of the next generation.

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