Crossing The Pond

Silicon Valley is and will be the magnet of entrepreneurship and the Internet sector – worldwide (see also my earlier post regarding the future of the Valley). I have had the honor to participate in several panels this week, mainly talking about the advantages and obstacles for entrepreneurs around the world to come over to Silicon Valley – either just to open a branch or to transfer their company entirely. The panels were organized by the Plug & Play Tech Center where my own company is hosted and which I highly recommend.

Below I am summarizing some of my thoughts and learnings during these sessions:

1. Define your goals
   You will want to know what are your goals for coming over to the Valley: are they funding related, is it going to be a business development effort or do you want to build up a developer team here?
2. Make a budget
   Coming over to the Valley is not cheap. Of course, I am not addressing large companies with this blog post. Start-ups often have a very tight budget and you will want to consider the costs of an office in the Valley: from travel costs (relatively low recently), to accomodation, office rental, car rental (you’ll need one, as public transportation is limited) and others. Below $3000/month it is impossible if you want your own accomodation.
3. Plan long-term
   I don’t believe it makes sense to establish an office for a short period of time only. You might want to do just a business trip, but establishing an office in the US is a long-term project and you should see it as that.
4. Review your personal situation and communication strategy
   Are you bringing your family, the whole team? How are you planning to communicate with your home based management team? My experience is that this is not trivial. Yes, daily Skype calls are possible (and necessary), but phone calls cannot replace personal meetings and brainstroming sessions, so I believe it is necessary that the team gets together on a regular basis. Once per months seems to be feasible.
5. Plan in advance your “entry strategy”
   Planning at least four months in advance is strongly recommended. In that time you want to solve the issues from above, initiate contacts with office space landlords, lawyers and especially review your own network for already existing contacts in the Valley.  

   A very viable “entry strategy” might be the participation in a contest or conference in general. I have for example participated with my company 3scale in the Techcrunch50 global competition conference which has been hugely successful for our company.

6. Check your local public institutions for support
   There is often much more support available than you’d expect. Local governments, the Chamber of Commerce and other institutions are usually very happy to help – promoting their companies in other countries. Specifically for companies out of Barcelona I can recommend: Barcelona Chamber of Commerce, Barcelona Activa, Instituto Español de Comercio Exterior (ICEX), Consortium for Commercial Promotion of Catalonia and many others.
7. Once you are in the Valley: Connect!
   It is very easy to connect once you touched the ground in the Valley, but you need to be out there: attend any conference that is related to your business, check the following networks:  

   European Entrepreneurs at Stanford

   SF New Tech

   SVASE

   Churchill Club

   Events at the Plug and Play Tech Center
   and for some leisure: Meetup

   Oh – and check out Craigslist.org – they can help with almost everything.

8. Do it!
   There are a lot of good reasons to be in the Valley. If your company can make it here, it can make it anywhere in the world. The Valley has the highest aggregation of (Internet) knowledge anywhere in the world and an ecosystem that many other countries can only dream of.

Good luck!

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