Overheard in Silicon Valley

If my previous post was an indication of summarizing my daily lessons learned in the Valley, yes, I slacked off. I was busy learning about many things, and I would like to share some lessons learned with my readers. Mostly just brain dump of various things, but I'll try to bucket them into different categories.



Economy

• It's tough out there (quite frankly, everywhere these days), but productivity is WAY up stemming from low burn rate and increased work hours.
• Growth is still the king. Monetization can happen when the economy recovers
• (somewhat of a contradiction to the above) "Product, product, product. Growth later, please"
• Not that many companies feeling the pains in a tangible way. They just want to stay low until somebody else brave (or dumb) enough makes a big move.
  

Startup/Company Gossips

• Silicon Valley needs the next Google (awesome product with real revenue stream [not just a proven revenue model]) real soon
• Semiconductor industry is about to enter the most difficult times in its history
• SV always talks about SV, Boston talks about Boston vs. SV
• "Recycling" high valuation deals is somewhat of a trend
• Angels are busier than ever
• Facebook's talent hemorrhage is a big contrast to its predecessors like Google, Yahoo, etc.
• Entrepreneurs here live on dreams, elsewhere driven by reality
• Lots of excitement around Palm Pre. Most of the design features actually got "stolen" from another company
  
• While operational experience is highly respected, venture business is really about accessibility to deals
• New York's rise to stardom in entrepreneurship is noticeable from the other side of coast. With top-notch innovations and investors to enable the whole ecosystem
• Boston's main competitive advantage is largely top academic institutions
• Google fired some flamingos on the dinosaur sculpture, so that the employees can spend the time more productively
  

Other Stuff

• Too many good restaurants contributing to accelerated weight gain. No wonder the weather is so good all year round. I needed to burn some calories all the time
• Intuition is highly respected. Analytics, less so.

Too much to list all them out, but I'm sure I'll use some of the lessons learned in the future posts.