Mar 12, 2008 | Silicon Valley Events
Last week Susan Lucas-Conwell, chief of www.SDForum.org kindly invited me to a gathering of the Edinburgh-Stanford Link www.edinburghstanfordlink.org, a high tech collaboration between both universities, funded by Scottish Enterprise. She knows only too well I can’t resist a good evening out with my fellow lads and lassies. Och aye.
Internet guru Mark Fletcher www.wingedpig.com was brave enough to host the invasion of whisky-drinking venture-capital pursuing Scots at his Dr. Suess-inspired pin-ball and pool table filled mansion in the hills of Redwood City.
I chatted with some jolly Scottish entrepreneurs (who sounded suspiciously English!) and they described the humiliation of pitching to VCs at Google. One nugget of advice: if you want to build a social network – hosting competitions is key. Everyone wants to be a winner of course! Mike Clauser, US tech entrepreneur and angel funder in Scotland seemed a bit under the weather: whisky or flu, I’m not quite sure? But I hope he’s recovered by now.
Also chatted with the host and his entourage about proper kilt wearing etiquette, and the Scots’ propensity for deep frying everything from haggis to mars bars. Even plugged my concept for a green living website, but sadly no blank checks were forthcoming…
Before Susan and I hit the winding road, I met with the charming Margaret McGarry of www.scottish-enterprise.com who told me about the three Scottish entrepreneurs who knocked on every door in Sand Hill Road earlier that day and had some good leads (no joke!). Still hoping to hear the good news from Margaret: that their mission was $$$$ successful. I love to hear about SV sharing its wealth and wisdom with the Auld Country.
Mar 7, 2008 | Silicon Valley Events
Guest blog: does everyone know your name?
On Thursday morning March 6 I hauled myself out of bed at dawn to attend Project Cornerstone’s Asset Champions Breakfast. So why should Silicon Valley parents care?
Well, if you aren’t familiar with Project Cornerstone, check out www.projectcornerstone.org. It’s good stuff and every parent in the valley should pay attention.
I won’t give you the marketing spiel but basically Project Cornerstone has identified things we should be doing that will help develop healthy, caring and responsible children. How can any parent argue with that?!
OK, you want the pitch? Here is it, direct from their Web site:
Project Cornerstone’s vision is simple —to build a web of support around every young person in our community. This web of support includes families, schools, community centers, faith communities and local businesses. Unfortunately, these resources are disconnected from each other and often from children and youth themselves. Project Cornerstone facilitates the connection of the separate parts of the web so that young people can count on individuals and organizations working together to provide them with consistent support and guidance.
The great thing about Project Cornerstone is that they have formalized programs but also just simple things we can be doing every day to make our youth feel valued.
Do you know the name of the children in your neighborhood? If not, learn them and greet them regularly.
Do you smile at children and say hello when you pass them on the street or in a store? It’s simple but it makes a difference.
At the breakfast yesterday, Misha Balangit, a senior at Gunderson High School, who was the Masters of Ceremony with Chief of Police Rob Davis summed it up: “You may not realize how a little thing can make such a big difference.”
Cheers, Vikki Bowes-Mok, SiliconMom reader and contributor
Mar 6, 2008 | Silicon Valley Events
Andrew Weil MD www.drweil.com got the Flint Center crowd doing some heavy breathing last night at Dick Henning’s celebrity forum. What a guy! Looks more jolly Santa than health and fitness guru, but boy did he have some good advice and most of the audience was straining forward and hanging on his every word.
The future of healthcare in the US is so desperate, he said, the disaster may sink our economy. As our population ages, it will place a larger and larger burden on our workers. Scary stuff! A strong advocate of integrated medecine, he riles against the “anti-aging” approach reminding us that aging is a natural process. Instead, our goal should be staying healthy for longer and to do that, he encourages us to make good lifestyle choices . The usual suspects: good diet, exercise, adequate rest and sleep. But some cool green ideas.
He recommends: plenty wild salmon (omega 3 is brilliant for our blood and has been linked to lower levels of depression); fruits and veggies with strong pigments (esp. berries – strong antioxidants); turmeric and jasmine tea.
Weil also reminded us that we should revere and include our older friends and relatives in our lives more, just like they do in Okinawa, Japan (a place with legendary longivity www.okinawa.com). He suggested laughter as a stress buster www.laughteryoga.org and then led us in some heavy breathing. Wow: it felt good to switch off for a few minutes; breathe in for 4, hold for 4, then breathe out for 6 …with about two thousand other people. Conspire means to breathe together, so we had one big CONSPIRACY SESSION. I love these simple GREEN solutions to world problems.
Many thanks to Dr. Weil, you’ve inspired me to go back to basics. Now it’s time to get moving… must check out the wild salmon counter at Safeway, grab some “rainbow” fruit and veg… and call my mother!
Feb 5, 2008 | Silicon Valley Events
Waiting, just waiting
Why life “on hold” doesn’t work for families
waiting
From the Mercury News Column Archives
by Alison van Diggelen, July 2000
I must be one of the few people in Silicon Valley who breathed a little sigh of relief when the stock market started to fall earlier this year. The good news is that a lot of Silicon Valley-ites may have got a sound reality check. Net worths are lower, but homes and families may be happier.
The “deferred life plan” may work well for the young and unattached. Their life is their work, and their work place an extension of college life, a social club. As Bill Gates said of his young software programmers, “if they want, we will give them a sleeping bag, but there is something romantic about sleeping under the desk. They want to do it.” For them, “all nighters” are a form of team bonding, something to brag about.
But for workers with partners and kids, trying out the same strategy may not work. They may wake up one day like Rip van Winkle not recognizing their kids, their partner or themselves. It’s hard for “deferred life planners” and happy families to co-exist in the new economy of Silicon Valley.
Sure we’d all love to share in the technology gold rush, but the problem is that all work and no play don’t mesh well with sound family life. You may be willing to put your life on hold for a few years, but kids are different, they won’t be put on hold. Like it or not, they grow up fast, arguably at a faster rate than it takes stock options to vest.
Up until recently there’s been the feeling that the market can’t wait, you must ride the wave today or it won’t be there tomorrow. But it’s only the stellar news you hear about, not the nineteen out of twenty startups that fail to scoop the jackpot.
I recently read one of my favorites Dr. Seuss books to my kids: “Oh the Places You’ll Go!” The double page “Waiting Place” stopped me in my tracks when I read it to my kids last week. To me, it sums up the lives of many of us in Silicon Valley.
“…You’ll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space
headed I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place…
…for people just waiting..”
Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting, perhaps for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break”
And for us in Silicon Valley, I could add,
“Waiting,…
for that first demo
or the big trade show,
or the I.P.O.
or the ratio
of the P to E to grow and grow.
Everyone is just waiting.”
I’m not suggesting people are sitting around waiting, on the contrary they are furiously pursuing some grand ambition, but are so blinded by the “gold”, the technology or their peers, that they neglect what’s going on at home. They are working and waiting.
In “The Monk and the Riddle”, a new book about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, author Randy Komisar of Portola Valley, says that the passion for work is often missing, replaced by some monetary dream. He says of some entrepreneurs; “They see their enterprises the way an eight-year-old sees vegetables: you must eat your peas before getting your pie (i.e. the jackpot).”
Tiffany Carboni, an associate editor for a glossy Bay Area magazine resigned her position in February due the allure of stock options at a dot-com. When the market took a downturn in March, it made her do some soul-searching, “I decided that the goal of getting rich fast wasn’t as important as my happiness.” Her change of heart was quick enough that she came back to her old job, where her passion lay, and was welcomed back with a promotion.
So, if the market downturn hasn’t made you or your partner see the light and come home in the daylight, maybe it’s time to treat your family to a copy of Dr. Seuss’ classic, earmarked at the “Waiting Place” page and see if the Doctor’s timeless wisdom can permeate the thick Silicon Valley skin of stock-option-filled dreams.
© siliconmom
Nov 30, 2005 | Silicon Valley Events
Demise of the Corner Café
By Alison RG van Diggelen
From Silicon Valley Biz Ink column archives, 2002
When I was over in London this summer, a friend, who recently left Silicon Valley for the greener pastures of Ascot, asked me how things were in the valley these days. Good and bad, I said.
After months and months of huge job cuts dominating front-page news, I told her that silver lining stories are now beginning to bud. Perhaps it’s because the downturn has been with us long enough that we crave some good news. Every paper has stories about shorter commutes, easier hiring, reduced house prices, quality of life improvements.
But really! We should be ashamed of ourselves. It’s a little soon to be making hoopla over our dearly departed. They may be in deepest Demoines but I mean their bodies are still warm. They’re probably still wired to the web, still in touch with the valley in one way or another. The way some press stories read, it’s as though those fleeing Silicon Valley fell off the edge of the earth. OK, Siliconians are not renowned for their empathy, (we’re too busy being creative), but still. For all we know, those with pink slips may have looked over their shoulders on their way out of the valley and heard us cheering, reveling in the extra room on the road now that their car is no longer jostling for position on Highway 85 every morning. Hey, shouldn’t we be showing a little more respect?
By contrast, London is still thriving thanks to a huge consumer spending boom. As I shopped with about half of the European Community in Covent Garden one Saturday morning, I kept recalling the independent café in our San Jose neighborhood, which folded this summer. It’s been sitting empty and forlorn for months. There is no silver lining in sight here, just a gradual destruction of its “Down-Under” memory as creditors come by each month to seize more fittings.
Two years ago, I was delighted when this independent coffee shop moved into the neighborhood. I rallied to support this one-woman business as she tried to swim against the tidal wave of Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee. I’d watch her red-rimmed eyes as she frothed the milk for my cafe latte and looked around the empty tables. I wondered how many cups of coffee she had to sell each day to pay the rent.
I got in the habit of going in just before my son started school around the corner. By June, her anxious manner had melted into a jolly disposition. She’d say to my five-year old, “Come on back and let’s make your mama’s latte.” He would trot round beside her and emerge moments later with a beaming smile waving a blue and white sticker or a shiny new Frisbee showing the coffee shop logo.
The coffee shop supported local charity events, turning up at the Almaden Times Classic 10K with balloons for the kids and free coffee for all. (Funnily enough there wasn’t a Starbucks cup in sight.)
One Saturday the kids and I cycled from our house along the creek path and refreshed our tired bodies with strawberry milkshakes and ham croissants from the café before we journeyed back. We sat at the table by the window and the kids counted the fluffy gray Koalas peeking out from make believe trees, their branches festooned with silver tinsel, around us. That was just days before she served her last cup of coffee.
On our return from London we went to check out the coffee shop. “What will happen to the Koalas?” the kids ask.
We peer in through the plate glass window. The trees and Koalas were gone. All that remains of them are a handful of plastic leaves strewn across the gray vinyl floor and some loose strands of silver tinsel. Wooden wall cupboards gap open; a couple of coffee bean sacks lie limp where the coffee roaster used to be. On the counter top sits a half empty bottle of Calistoga. Near the counter lies a computer box, its side ripped off, a mangle of electronic innards exposed.
We turn away, my teeth catching my lower lip, as the kids bombarded me with questions, “But why?” “Will the Koalas be OK?”
The local merchants tutt-tutt and gossip. The tenant was behind in the rent, disappeared. “We’re fed up being next to an empty shell,” they say. They’d like to see a Starbucks go in. It would be good for business.
About the author: Alison van Diggelen is founder and editor of siliconmom.com. She lives in San Jose with her husband and American born children.
© Siliconmom.
