Paddy’s Valley

David Smith in EI Palo Alto sent me information on an exciting sounding event that is on December 5th.

It is called the Silicon Valley Mixer and is happening in The Tech Mart in Santa Clara. They say it’s a major opportunity to mix “Silicon Valley Style” with Founders, CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, CMOs, VPs & Directors, Investors and Influencers. They generally have 350+ in attendance.

Tickets go on sale on October 25th and go here to book them ($30) and find out more.

David also pointed out that workit.com is a great resource for finding out what events are happening in the Valley, particularly in the weeks running up to the trip.

Sean Tario from UnitedLayer has put us in touch with Alex Lavidge from Altrupreneur who has just opened the Sandbox Suites co-working facility in San Francisco.

I told them that several of the Paddy’s Valley travellers are very interested in co-working and I know some of you are now in such a facility in Dublin. Alex would be happy for some of us to call in and see their set-up. This won’t be a full formal tour, just a sub-group one for those who really want to find out more about co-working and see how other locations operate.

Pop a comment here if you are interested in visiting the Sandbox Suites so we can gauge interest.

We’re really thrilled that InterTradeIreland (the all-island trade and business development body) is now on board the Paddy’s Valley tour.

They will:

1. lead a MasterClass for participating companies and entrepreneurs on November 26th where companies can hone their investor pitch and proposition before an expert panel (all participants will be asked to furnish a 5 page Executive Summary in advance). Details TBA.
2. Co-host a VC and angel investor networking dinner in Palo Alto in association with Enterprise Ireland, on Tuesday 4th December”

For those of you who don’t know InterTrade, their mission is:

InterTradeIreland’s mission is to enhance the global competitiveness of the all-island economy to the mutual benefit of Ireland and Northern Ireland through measures such as the creation of knowledge-intensive all-island trade and business development networks and the implementation of all-island trade and business development programmes.

We should be announcing that several Northern Irish companies are joining the trip very soon.

We’ve been kindly offered a tour of the UnitedLayer datacenter in south San Francisco during the PV week. This is tentatively arranged for the Wednesday morning.

The building they are in is 425,000 square feet, clears a little over 85% of all Northern California’s internet traffic, and is home to major providers such as XO communications, Level3, Telex, AboveNet, Time Warner, and many others as well as Facebook.

Not only will they do a tour (and arrange a side-visit to the Facebook floor) but Sean Tario has offered a talk/Q&A on all things infrastructure related including how their clients scale and UnitedLayer’s role in that process. Whilst I’m sure many on the trip will know about these concepts in principle, it should be very enlightening to see how it happens in practice.

Conor O’Neill was interviewed by Ryan Carson during the FOWA Road Trip in Dublin last Thursday and, after briefly talking about his own company, gave a great introduction to Paddy’s Valley and the Web 2.0 scene in Ireland. See below -

We heard some great itinerary suggestions during the meeting in Dublin last Thursday and more continue to come in through email. Can I remind people to check the previously published rough itinerary and then encourage you to post your ideas as comments to that, or here, for further discussion.

Damien announced the other day on Jaiku that

Facebook VP got back to me and would be delighted to give a tour to the Paddy’s Valley folks when we’re over.

Nice one Damien!

Date/time will be published when we have them but this is a real coup and should be a highlight of the week for many of us.

Earlier today Karlin Lillington left a comment here to let us now that either she or John Collins will be travelling with us on Paddy’s Valley to report on our activities.

This is absolutely wonderful news and if anyone doubted that this trip has a very serious core purpose, I think they can now rest easy.

Karlin’s comment in full:

Either John Collins or I will be covering this week with all of you for the Times, most likely me, as the Valley is my home turf and where I grew up.

I also have been approached about possibly setting up some contacts with some Valley folks of interest that I know on the blogging/social networking side. Amongst those mentioned are Dan Gillmor & Dave Winer. If this is of interest let me know. Also anyone with the most remote interest in computing will want to see the Computer History Museum in Mountain View — their collection in Visible Storage is amazing — I know the director there fairly well and can likely set up a special tour with a few extras. Also there is a separate museum, The Tech, in San Jose. It is more a hands on contextual and thematic sort of place but also interesting.

I was also suggesting you should do a group lunch at Buck’s in Woodside as, along with the old Wagon Wheel, that IS the heart of Valley deals and ideas.

If people have other interests let me know and I will see what I can do.

There will be three phases to the training to help you hone your pitch for Paddy’s Valley Week

1. Thursday 13th September before DemoBar
2. Late October
3. During the trip

Looking forward to meeting all those taking part in the first phase next week. The second phase will be much more in-depth and take at least a full day. Details to come.

Thursday will look like this:

1. Starts at 2pm on Thursday 13th September in Ely HQ on Hanover Quay Dublin
2. A panel of 4 will be present to listen and advise
3. You will have ten minutes to do a pitch followed by 20 minutes of feedback
4. There won’t be a projector/screen but they are happy for you to bring laptop or thumbdrive with demo/collateral to use. It might make most sense to speak for perhaps 2-3 minutes to give the elevator pitch and then drill into the detail sitting down using a laptop
5. Effectively they are trying to simulate the scenario in DemoBar or at Paddy’s Valley where you probably won’t get to present a deck
6. The panel have mentioned some points to consider:
   • Start the pitch by saying where the business is in its lifecycle so that the tenor of the subsequent conversation is a balanced one and nobody is overselling
   • Outline the company’s situation today
   • Business model (how is it monetised)
   • Describe the complication or problem that the industry / customer faces, that your product solves and why has it arisen?
   • What is the proposition that the company is proposing to solve the problem etc…
   • This should lead in to a discussion on how unique is the company’s proposition versus competition and how does it break down into a competitive advantage across product, pricing, distribution etc….
   • Any market validation from customers is always highly regarded by VC’s.
   • Have a fix on your finance requirements for the short to medium term
7. Nice deck on Pitching
8. And of course, Mr Kawasaki

Today Pat Phelan and the Cubic Telecom guys announced that they have secured €5m in investment. They also gave hints of some of the really exciting products we can expect to see from them over the coming months.

Pat just received a batch of one of those products – MAXroam. These mobile phone SIMs have some killer features for travellers. The byline is “Travel Global, pay local and your callers pay local too”. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg and I’m sure we’ll hear all about them soon.

Cubic is providing some of these MAXroam SIMs for the Paddy’s Valley tour and I cannot wait to try them out! Thanks Pat.