Day 11, the last official day of the program! And an exciting one! We are going back to Mountain View, to the 500 Startups office there. We have a meeting with Dave McClure, a celebrity in the startup world!

Dave welcomed us and told us the office is quite empty today, but on Monday 30 teams are starting their accelerator program at the office. Ten of these teams are international. 500 Startups already invested $70 million dollars in about 700 startups, 50% through the accelerator program and 50% through seed investment. They only did a few investments in later stage rounds.

Day 10 started with a visit to Stanford! What a beautiful campus! It is an incredibly inspiring place! 

We went to meet Nikkie from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. They organize all kinds or courses and lectures for their students. They have great lectures with amazing founders. They also arrange internships for their students where they go and work in startup companies, next to the CEO to see how it works. The founders of Instagram studied at Stanford and the founder of Yahoo too, he had built a building in Stanford, as thank for his amazing time there. It is overall known that Stanford students are a good match for entrepreneurs. It was nice to talk to Nikkie and get to know some more details about how they support students to become entrepreneurs.

In the morning we drove to San Jose for a meeting at the Ebay Inc./Paypal office. We met our friend and Paypal Developer Robert Schwentker. He runs Paypal's Startup Blueprint Program. He invited us for the Commerce Innovation Showcase.

Day 8 started very early! We had to leave the hotel at 7am to go to the first event. We went to the Orrick event: " The Fundraising Series (Part one) - Building your story". The event started with a breakfast and some networking, and then it was time for the presentations. There were four speakers at the event: the first one, Gleen McCrae from Early Growth Financial Services talked about creating your three year financial plan; then Noah Lichtenstein from Cowboy Ventures talked about constructing your competitive value proposition. The third presentation was Stephanie Palmeri from SoftTech VC, talking about understanding your competitive landscape and the last was Niko Bonatsos with Go-To-Market Strategy.

After a great weekend, everybody was ready for the new week. Some people a little more sunburned than the other... ;)

Our first meeting of the second week was at the 500 Startups office in San Francisco. They recently opened this and are still working out of a temporary office, while they are finishing the other office. They now have their first batch of startups there.

The weekend in San Francisco is a great opportunity to refresh brains, enjoy wonderful places and to prepare for the events and meetings for the next week. One of the brightest impressions of the weekend – visiting Coursmos, Happy Farm II Cycle resident, who now is based in the Valley.

Day 4! Everybody is getting used to living in San Francisco J In the morning we take the bus to the Caltrain Station and traveled down to Mountain View.

The reason for our trip to Mountain View: a meeting with the amazing Kaushal Chokshi! Kaushal is the Founder and the President of Scaale Inc.  and together with his team, he welcomed us at his Mountain View office. They prepared a very interesting workshop for us.

Another sunny day in San Francisco!

Our meeting with Julian Zegelman was postponed to next week, so our first meeting was with Igor Shoifot, Board Director of Happy Farm. It was a very interesting workshop. He talked about different things and gave some useful tips.

A sunny day, instead of the rain we have had since we arrived! The teams did some work, some sightseeing and had some personal meetings.

So the amazing American Business Safari for startups and Happy Farm Business Incubator residents started on the 1st of April. No fools, everything is serious! 

Saar Leroy, Startup Relations Manager @ Happy Farm

First full day in San Francisco! And Fool’s day as well! ;)