June 9-13, San Francisco, California, USA
What do you get when you combine hungry entrepreneurs and bullish risk-taking investors seeking innovation? You get Silicon Valley. CEED Directors from around the world came together this past month in Silicon Valley to better understand the “secret sauce” behind the region, and to discover innovative techniques to inspire and support the entrepreneurs in their network.
Throughout the week the Directors visited incubators, investors, and companies as well as Stanford University. They heard about the importance of “failing fast,” from Corey Ford, CEO of Matter.vc, a media accelerator, and how to provide ‘easy to apply’ learning from Twitter’s Marko Gargenta, a Serbian-American whose company was recently acquired by Twitter. CEED Directors also had the opportunity to sit in on a pitch session hosted by the Keiretsu Forum, a global angel investing group.
Most importantly, CEED Directors learned the importance of ‘the Silicon Valley mindset,’ and how a company’s mission and its ‘sense of purpose’ are among the Valley’s key ingredients. This, together with a true desire to empathetically understand your customer, being ‘open’ to change and embracing failure are additionally among the factors that make Silicon Valley what it is today. We cannot hope to duplicate the exact recipe in our markets, but CEED can encourage many through its programs and, most importantly, through its shared values.
To learn more about CEED Global, visit https://ceed-global.org/
