May 15, 2014 at 12:56Report from Silicon Valley Open Doors conference in Silicon Valley - meeting people
Many are already familiar with the annual SVOD conference in Silicon Valley (the closest will be held June 11-12 ), which although it does not focus entirely on the Russian-speaking audience, it traditionally brings together prominent Russian-speaking and English-speaking business investors (this year, one of the speakers will be the head of Electronic Arts ) On SVOD, you can easily chat with interesting people, which we did.
Sergey Burkov, an entrepreneur with a degree in physics, sold Google startup in the early 2000s, was the first head of Google R&D in Russia (unofficially has the status of “the person who brought Google to Russia”), the mentor of the 500 Startups accelerator and a member of the board of directors of the business association Ambar. Sergey gave a very interesting and unexpected interview. Along with a story about what he does and why it is worth going to SVOD, Sergey also told the story of his failure in one of his projects ( long interview with Sergey ).
There are more interesting videos under the cut.
Alex Fedoseev has already twice presented his startups at SVOD. The first time he presented the startup 4HomeMedia in 2007, the startup was sold to Motorola in 2010, where Alex took over as director of product development. In 2013, Alex introduced his new startup 1World Online, which received more than a million investments after the conference.
Руководитель Evernote Фил Либин рассказал о том, что презентация компании на SVOD сыграла большую роль их последующем взлёте (текущая оценка компании 2 млрд долларов). После SVOD Evernote получили первый крупный раунд инвестиций, в том числе и от российских инвесторов (Troika). В коротком интервью Фил Либин говорит много интересных вещей о трендах, самообразовании, о планах Evernote и о том, как максимизировать шансы создания успешного стартапа (см. по ссылке расшифровку на русском языке). В целом, предысторию создания Evernote можно узнать из нашего интервью с её основателем Степаном Пачиковым.
The well-known Russian businessman Ruslan Fazlyev, CEO and founder of Ecwid (the world's most popular online shopping platform for mobile devices and Facebook, the # 1 Facebook application in its category) considers it bad taste to call mobile a trend, but at the same time emphasizes that the mobile fully not even started yet.
As for education, Elena Masolova, co-founder of Groupon Russia and CEO Pixonic, at SVOD presented her new startup Eduson.tv, tailored specifically for this area. Elena predicts that in 3 years education will completely change - most of the students will study online from home, and the programs will consist of courses from various educational institutions. Elena also noted the trend on mobile, but more like a channel for delivering information, as well as virtual content (coupons, online courses, virtual goods, games, etc.).
American investors, such as Brian Jacobs (a well-known investor in companies such as Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, Lithium, Yammer, Veeva, SupportSpace, Echosign, Box), are considered a very “hot” sphere of enterprise, due to increased demand in the B2B sector. Brian also noted the cloud, the decline in popularity of B2C and CleanTech, as well as advising you not to follow the trends too much, because if you have a good application for users (B2C) that you believe in, then it is very likely that by the time you get it run, B2C will be on horseback again.
B2B-startup BuildersCloud, a cloud service for large construction companies (for drawings, for example), was presented by Andrei Nokhrin, a former manager of a construction company, now a resident of TechStars incubator. BuildersCloud also received an offer from the 500 Startups accelerator, but they chose TechStars, which, according to Andrey, is better. One of Andrey's advisers is Sergey Burkov.
Dmitry Chikhachev, managing partner of Runa Capital, noted that many startups are trying to create products for large corporations, which, in his opinion, is not worth doing, because it requires huge financial costs and long sales cycles. For large corporations, the main thing is not how innovative the product is, but how reliable and time-tested it is. Although in this area, many startups manage to succeed. Dmitry noted as “megatrends” mobile, peer-to-peer communications, cloud computing. Big changes are coming in the fields of education, finance, healthcare, public services.
Christine Tsai, partner at 500 Startups Incubator. According to her, the trends do not last long enough, you just need to find an acute problem that we would like to solve, but with an adjustment for assessing the size of the market.
We talked with Jacob Diener, the founder of Driveway Software, which helps insurance companies to better identify drivers' risk. Invested in startup> $ 1 million, incl. from Russian investors (Igor Matsanyuk, Igor Ryabenky). Full interview on the link .
This is only a small part of the people with whom we talked. There were many other well-known investors, entrepreneurs, journalists (TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Bloomberg, The New York Times), and even NASA astronaut, who is now an entrepreneur.
This short overview video conveys the atmosphere of the conference:
Read more about the Silicon Valley Open Doors conference here .
Thank you for your attention and for the positive feedback. Subscribe to our blog on Habré , Twitter , Facebook , Google+ , VK , YouTube-channel to follow updates from Silicon Valley. Previous posts can be viewed on RusValley.com .
Sergey Burkov, an entrepreneur with a degree in physics, sold Google startup in the early 2000s, was the first head of Google R&D in Russia (unofficially has the status of “the person who brought Google to Russia”), the mentor of the 500 Startups accelerator and a member of the board of directors of the business association Ambar. Sergey gave a very interesting and unexpected interview. Along with a story about what he does and why it is worth going to SVOD, Sergey also told the story of his failure in one of his projects ( long interview with Sergey ).
There are more interesting videos under the cut.
Alex Fedoseev has already twice presented his startups at SVOD. The first time he presented the startup 4HomeMedia in 2007, the startup was sold to Motorola in 2010, where Alex took over as director of product development. In 2013, Alex introduced his new startup 1World Online, which received more than a million investments after the conference.
Руководитель Evernote Фил Либин рассказал о том, что презентация компании на SVOD сыграла большую роль их последующем взлёте (текущая оценка компании 2 млрд долларов). После SVOD Evernote получили первый крупный раунд инвестиций, в том числе и от российских инвесторов (Troika). В коротком интервью Фил Либин говорит много интересных вещей о трендах, самообразовании, о планах Evernote и о том, как максимизировать шансы создания успешного стартапа (см. по ссылке расшифровку на русском языке). В целом, предысторию создания Evernote можно узнать из нашего интервью с её основателем Степаном Пачиковым.
The well-known Russian businessman Ruslan Fazlyev, CEO and founder of Ecwid (the world's most popular online shopping platform for mobile devices and Facebook, the # 1 Facebook application in its category) considers it bad taste to call mobile a trend, but at the same time emphasizes that the mobile fully not even started yet.
As for education, Elena Masolova, co-founder of Groupon Russia and CEO Pixonic, at SVOD presented her new startup Eduson.tv, tailored specifically for this area. Elena predicts that in 3 years education will completely change - most of the students will study online from home, and the programs will consist of courses from various educational institutions. Elena also noted the trend on mobile, but more like a channel for delivering information, as well as virtual content (coupons, online courses, virtual goods, games, etc.).
American investors, such as Brian Jacobs (a well-known investor in companies such as Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, Lithium, Yammer, Veeva, SupportSpace, Echosign, Box), are considered a very “hot” sphere of enterprise, due to increased demand in the B2B sector. Brian also noted the cloud, the decline in popularity of B2C and CleanTech, as well as advising you not to follow the trends too much, because if you have a good application for users (B2C) that you believe in, then it is very likely that by the time you get it run, B2C will be on horseback again.
B2B-startup BuildersCloud, a cloud service for large construction companies (for drawings, for example), was presented by Andrei Nokhrin, a former manager of a construction company, now a resident of TechStars incubator. BuildersCloud also received an offer from the 500 Startups accelerator, but they chose TechStars, which, according to Andrey, is better. One of Andrey's advisers is Sergey Burkov.
Dmitry Chikhachev, managing partner of Runa Capital, noted that many startups are trying to create products for large corporations, which, in his opinion, is not worth doing, because it requires huge financial costs and long sales cycles. For large corporations, the main thing is not how innovative the product is, but how reliable and time-tested it is. Although in this area, many startups manage to succeed. Dmitry noted as “megatrends” mobile, peer-to-peer communications, cloud computing. Big changes are coming in the fields of education, finance, healthcare, public services.
Christine Tsai, partner at 500 Startups Incubator. According to her, the trends do not last long enough, you just need to find an acute problem that we would like to solve, but with an adjustment for assessing the size of the market.
We talked with Jacob Diener, the founder of Driveway Software, which helps insurance companies to better identify drivers' risk. Invested in startup> $ 1 million, incl. from Russian investors (Igor Matsanyuk, Igor Ryabenky). Full interview on the link .
This is only a small part of the people with whom we talked. There were many other well-known investors, entrepreneurs, journalists (TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Bloomberg, The New York Times), and even NASA astronaut, who is now an entrepreneur.
This short overview video conveys the atmosphere of the conference:
Read more about the Silicon Valley Open Doors conference here .
Thank you for your attention and for the positive feedback. Subscribe to our blog on Habré , Twitter , Facebook , Google+ , VK , YouTube-channel to follow updates from Silicon Valley. Previous posts can be viewed on RusValley.com .