Here is a great summary put together by the students after we returned. I think it does a wonderful job of capturing the lessons learned on the trip.

Silicon Valley Final Presentation

The second ‘Understanding Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley’ started this week. Yesterday was our first full day of meetings.

We started out with Steve Larson at Callspark. Then had lunch at Suriya Thai with Alison Johnston from Aardvark, beers with Matt Van Horn at Digg, and a great experience at sfnewtech.

Here’s the gang at Lunch. It was fun, everyone was trying new stuff that was a little out of the comfort zone for a bunch of midwesterners.

The words of the day are “stalking” and “audacious.” This seemed to be a theme from many people in terms of both job hiring and job seeking.

I’ll update this initial post to include the blogs the students are writing:

• Drew Baumann


• Megan Hallberg


• Kiflu Arega


• Bryan Uhlenhake


• Jeni Arbuckle


• Kaitlin Showalter


• Aaron Gauthier


• Adam Pyzdrowski


• Jacob Otte

Although the weather back home may have been below zero, in Northern california he sun was out and it was 68 degrees. Perfect weather for a bikeride. So after talking to the nice folks at the Palo Alto Bike Shop Wes and I rented a couple of nice demo road bikes from Calmar bikes in Santa Clara. Calmar is right by our hotel and the staff there was super friendly and helpful in getting us set up for a ride. Incidentally Calmar has no relation to Calmar IA. I road a nice Spanish BH RoadROM and Wes road a hot pink Trek Pilot 5.2. Even though the bike was pink we felt pretty good passing all the californians on the way up Old La Honda Road.

Rather than head out from the hotel on the busy city streets I decided to take Novian’s advice and head into the foothills west of Palo Alto. You can see the ride we took on the map below. This is from a cool website called mapmyride.com that I will use in the future for keeping track of my rides.



The ride was just beautiful even though we had to climb 2500 feet to get to the view. On the way up we road through some big redwood trees.




Once you get on Skyline drive you can see the ocean on one side and the Valley on the other. Here’s me, I look more tired in the picture than I actually felt! Really, Honest!



The rest of the ride is a long coast down Page Mill Road and then some flat riding past the Stanford Dish and the Stanford Golf course. It would have been fun to stop and play 18 holes but I didn’t have my clubs with me.