Being part of the so-called Sand Hill crowd, you can sometimes forget that the rest of the country not to mention the world may not be in on the reference. I was once asked to address the leaders of the National Association of Broadcasters at Pebble Beach in Carmel Valley a mere hundred miles from Silicon Valley. Trouble was, nobody knew what I was talking about. I spent the first ten minutes of my one-hour talk explaining the concept to them, which was a new experience for me. I had been living in the bubble so long that it hadn t occurred to me that people outside it might not know what I was talking about.
Silicon Valley is a place for people with ideas.
It is a place where the right idea at the right time can yield remarkable returns for investors and entrepreneurs. It is known, rightly, as a place of simmering, sometimes spouting, creative enterprise. How ironic, then, that the venture capitalists who nurture this creativity aren t more creative in their choices of where to meet, eat, and mingle. The best example of this is the phenomenon of the Silicon Valley breakfast. Breakfast is a prime time here for discussing potential deals.