Paddy’s Valley

We now have a full set of logos available for use in media coverage and as badges on your blog. Here’s a sample:

The full set is available on Flickr.

A BIG thank you to Jan, Conor and Wannita at Touristr for taking care of this.

If you’re planning to stay with the group in the Cardinal Hotel in Palo Alto please make your room choice (standard or ‘european’) by tomorrow Wednesday 1st August. Either comment here or email us.

We’ve had a few people ask about exactly what will happen the week we are in Silicon Valley. It’s going to be quite a while before we have a detailed agenda and one of the main reasons for that is that it should be driven by the attendees.

However, to give some flavour, particularly to those who have only just heard about the trip, here are some of the things we see happening:

• We’ll get some sessions with Enterprise Ireland including advice on “how to pitch a US VC”
• We’ll have at least one (probably more) networking events where movers and shakers will attend
• We aim to do informal social dinners most nights where we invite people we admire or know
• Each attendee should try and set-up meetings with companies that are a match to their own businesses. These can be either lone runs or joint ones with some sub-set of the attendees
• We aim to get all of us into a few of the big guns e.g. Googleplex, Yahoo, HP etc
• Plenty of socialising and doing the sights (Computer History Museum etc)

Generally it is up to each attendee to make the best use of the opportunity for their own business.

I’m sure there are companies/people that each of us would like to access but have no contacts to. On the old wiki we had a the beginnings of a list of who each of us would like to meet. I’ll move that here and at a certain point we’ll put the call out to everyone to see if they can get intros for others but done in a way which respects everyone’s privacy.

There was a nice writeup in the Irish Times for Paddy’s Valley today. Read it behind their paywall. Tourist Republic, RelevantM and Grazr all got mentions. Finfacts also covered the trip here. Conor O’Neill also will be on 103FM today talking about the trip. Please let us know if there are any other mentions.

If you are new to the site and here as a result of the press coverage, please leave a comment or contact us on paddysvalley < at > Gmail .com if you want to know more. There are still places open for anyone that wishes to come along.

Update: RTE.ie coverage, ENN coverage, and Silicon Republic coverage.

Here’s a Paddy’s Valley map (kml format) created by compiling three Google MyMaps into one (thanks David and Alexia). You can open it directly in Google Earth or inputting the address into the Search Maps field on maps.Google.com.

You can also help us add other places of interest. Just sign into your Google account, visit maps.Google.com and click on the MyMaps tab. Then Create new map and start adding locations such as companies, cafes, sights, etc., to your own map of Silicon Valley. Save your map and click on the Link to this page link above the map to get your map address. Twitter it, Jaiku it, blog it or email it and we’ll add it to the combined map.

You’ve just got to love Dave McClure’s description of where we’re headed -

“We’re not in the middle of Bubble 2.0 — rather, we’re in the middle of Renaissance 2.0. Northern California is Italy. Palo Alto is Florence. San Francisco is Venice. Sequioa Capital (or Peter Thiel & Reid Hoffman) are the Medicis. Ev, Biz, Ben, Mena, Matt & Toni are the Gutenbergs. And Mark Zuckerburg is Da Vinci. Bene, molto bene “

Valleywag has published a guide to Palo Alto hotspots and guess what comes out on top? Coupa Cafe, as previously recommended on this blog by Nicole Simon and conveniently located around the corner from the Cardinal Hotel

In fact it seems that Coupa is the new Bucks – “You couldn’t swing a dead cat yesterday at Coupa Café in downtown Palo Alto without hitting a VC, an angel investor, a startup CEO or five wanna-be startup CEOs. Clearly this small spot (get the Venezuelan spicy hot chocolate) is the meet-and-greet place of choice for the latest generation of startup stars – especially the Web 2.0 crowd.”

But in case you can’t get a seat on that hallowed turf Valleywag lists a number of alternatives which we’ve now added to the Paddy’s Valley map.

We’ve chosen the Cardinal Hotel in Palo Alto as our base and worked out a group rate so please reply with your preference of room based on the following information:

Standard room with private bath (single or double occupancy) $125.00 + tax per night. These rooms have either (1) queen bed or (2) double beds.

European style rooms with shared hallway bath (sink in the room – toilet and shower independent in the hallway). $65.00 + tax single or double occupancy. These rooms have either (1) queen bed or (1) double bed.

The Cardinal will also work a group rate for the wireless and is offering a meeting room for our daily gatherings which has a small “business center” with terminal where guests can check e-mail etc.

Just a quick update. We’ve been chatting to Enterprise Ireland via Ben Mosse and they are going to help us as much as they can:

Enterprise Ireland are happy to support the initative and will help the group with facilitation of introductory sessions as per our discussion. I will also attend the week and give you on-the-ground advice. If there are entrepreneurs going out to pitch to VCs it might also be worthwhile to put together a pitch ‘bootcamp’ prior to going out to ensure that your pitches are waterproof.

We want to get people lessons in how to talk to American VCs before they talk to them and Ben and EI will help with that. They will also help with networking so we can meet investors and experienced people in Silicon Valley who can share their experiences with us. Big up EI!

This will be the holding space for the company wishlist for Paddy’s Valley. Someone needs to take ownership of compiling a list of companies we want to visit. Create the list however you want and point us to it and we’ll link to it from here. We can vote as a group and start contacting these companies to meet them.