The first day of our Business Safari tour for investors! There was a short welcome meeting the day before, we also bought phone numbers and had a dinner in a Japanese restaurant. But Monday morning we had the first meeting of the tour.

We met in Café de la Presses for a nice breakfast and then we walked to the meeting room in the Financial District for the first meeting. During this meeting Oleg Afansyev, one of the most influencial business trainers in RCIS, introduced the program. First everybody introduced themselves, talked about their jobs, interests, background and about why they joined the tour. Then Oleg talked about the goals for the tour and Anna Degtereva, Happy Farm accelerator CEO introduced the different meetings we will have during the two week tour.

 

After two hours, we had a short coffee break and then welcomed Igor Shoifot, partner at TMT Investments and Board Director of Happy Farm. He introduced Investing in Silicon Valley. He talked about different funds, VC companies and incubators: what they do, who are there main partners and what are the difference between them. He gave a lot of examples of what is going on here in Silicon Valley and what the options are. It was a great presentation to start these two weeks with and gave a general overview and we can get in more details during the next meetings with different funds, investors and startups.

 

Afterwards we took a taxi to the last meeting of the day. We went to the 500 Startups office in San Francisco to meet Artem Gassan. Artem is co-founder of Whale Path, an on-demand research platform, and he has over 8 years’ experience in building new successful startups and managing teams. He is an alumnus of Founder Institute, Plug and Play Startup Camp and recently finished the 500 Startups acceleration program with Whale Path. Artem did a great presentation with a lot of information about the history and evolution of Venture Capital, the difference between different investments rounds, the growth of seed funding and accelerators. He had a lot of great graphics to show all the different evolutions and trends. It was a really interesting presentation.

 

It was a very interesting, busy first day and everybody was ready for a calm evening to get ready for the next day.

To be continued!

Sincere yours,

Saar Leroy,

Happy Farm