After a near 24 hour trip to California, 9 of the 30 teams of Lisbon Challenge Spring’14 edition, met in San Francisco for the US Roadshow, where they were about to start the amazing opportunity of exploring the biggest entrepreneurial ecosystem in the world: Silicon Valley.
Between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, teams visited reputed accelerators, incubators and co-working spaces that got startups growing and succeeding in the last decade, such as YCombinator, Rocket Space, 500 Startups, Blackbox, The Alchemist, Runway, among others. This gave startups the chance to think about these programs, as a next step in their growth journey, as well as receive feedback about their project from other accelerators.
During these days, the teams got involved with some of the best companies in the ecosystem. Big named startups that turned into profitable companies, such as Google, Survey Monkey, Airbnb, Yahoo, Twitter, GitHub, Hotel Tonight, IFTTT and KivaZip, all had strong organizational culture and creative working spaces.
Going back in time and revisiting the academic life, d.school (Institute of Design at Stanford) opened its doors to our teams in a challenging workshop led by the Executive Director of the Design program, Bill Burnett, about Design Thinking as an important methodology to understand consumer needs.
These four days in California gave Lisbon Challenge teams great opportunities for networking, pitch practicing and feedback. Motivated by the great success stories of the Bay Area, startups reviewed their next steps having in mind clear and ambitious benchmarks.
Heading to our next and almost final stop - Boston - teams visited CIC (Cambridge Innovation Center) and their co-working space for startups, as well as MassChallenge, one of the major inspirations of Lisbon Challenge. In a very honest panel discussion with five Angel investors, teams received valuable tips on how to create and maintain a relationship with an investor, how to leverage and take advantage of this relationship and common practices of American investors and investment.
Coming back to Lisbon, a small incident on the plane allowed us to visit São Miguel island, in Azores, with breathtaking landscapes, almost perfectly ending our trip.