Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford

I've been praying to get one of the 25 coveted tickets to join the panel discussion at the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford Event (last Monday, 22nd Nov 2004), and I got one!

I didn't know what to expect from it, but I was surprised that there were more than 100 high powered CEOs/Directors/Presidents of UK companies or subsidiaries (like MS, Oracle, HSBC, IBM to name a few) in attendance.

I arrived at the venue quite early just to make sure I get inside the theatre. At around 7:15pm, the host then introduced the 7 Silicon Valley panelists. I started to become excited and took out my trusty camera. Each panelists were asked to give a brief bio to acquaint the audience. Evan Williams (first on left), founder of Blogger who later sold his company to Google exudes humbleness. He introduced himself as a man from the midwest (Nebraska) who found it difficult talking to people about his software, let alone get people to understand its use. Mr Williams then moved to California where he experienced the highs and lows of the dot-com era, where he had money and to a point where he had to fire people and learn how to maintain the java servers all alone.

"Sometimes, you need to be insane enough to believe that your idea is great."
-Evan Williams, 22nd November, Oxford

There were two venture capitalists (third from left and sixth from left) on the panel who talked about the role of VCs in forming Silicon Valley. Raymond Nasr (fourth from left) who works as a Director for Google is perhaps the most unique in terms of looks: sporting his dotted bow tie and round spectacles. He looks geeky, but doesn't talk like one. Raymond talked about how Google received a 100K check from the SUN CEO and how Google slowly grew and broke the myth of 'first-mover' advantage long held by Yahoo!.

Overall, it was a great event giving me a chance to meet interesting people mostly from the Said Business School and of course the panelists. This for me, is a once in a lifetime experience.