A month back Aaltoes hosted a recap session on the legendary Silicon Valley Tour. We heard some of the entrepreneurs traveling with us share their key insights from the trip. Now the videos are uploaded, so if you want to hear the ideas that arose from visiting the number one entrepreneurial hotspot of the world, visit the links below:

Aaltoes Lessons Learned in Silicon Valley: MySites & Ramine Darabiha
Aaltoes Lessons Learned from Silicon Valley: Widsen & Markus Nuotto
Aaltoes Lessons Learned in Silicon Valley: Qvik & Elias Pietilä
Aaltoes Lessons Learned in Silicon Valley: Futuuns & Kimmo Nurmisto
Aaltoes Lessons Learned in Silicon Valley: Nodeta & Mikael Roos and Otto Hilska

If you want to read more about the journey, revisit the blogposts from Aaltoes, Arctic Startup and Futuuns. We also made some ad hoc interviews which you can see here (including names such as Mårten Mickos, Zynga-founder Mark Pincus, Paul Graham etc.)

Next year is right around the corner and we have some initial plans of heading to Israel, China and maybe revisiting Silicon Valley. If you have suggestions where to go and what to see, don’t hesitate to contact the new board!

There’s one thing that is really pulling me to come live and develop my startup in the valley. It’s the way of working that is so efficient. This is real-time work.

Today we’ve had 6 meetings, none of which we knew about two days before. Most of the meetings we didn’t know about a couple of hours before the meetings. So, the pace of change is really fast, and there’s the possibility that your schedule changes any minute. It allows you to actually work on what’s the most important thing at any point in time, without any unnecessary meetings. If someone gives you a really great introduction and you have the chance to do an important meeting you can do it right away. Some meetings are done, some are lost. I guess you could calculate how much more efficient this makes everything. It gives you real freedom in work when you don’t have to schedule forward more than a couple of hours.

I really like it and it’s the way I want to work. Of course it’s a managers schedule and probably not suitable for developers.

I think we should try it in Aalto, at least we can start in Aaltoes…

We’ve now started counting hours (about six) until our departure to Silicon Valley. Kristo, Krista and the team have done a great job in booking interesting meetings and visits, such as Y Combinator. In the web team we had some spare time, so we decided to re-theme the site a bit. From this page you can follow our journey, comment on blog posts and watch videos. The schedule is going to be very tight, but we’ll try to find some for updating.

Enjoy!

- Lauri & Jori

The Aaltoes team is working hard to make an unforgettable experience for Aalto University students and startups. We have over 40 participants signed up and Arctic Startup is joining us for the trip.

The participants are entrepreneurs who are using the trip as an opportunity to benchmark their products, gain insights for business planning, meet people and make valuable contacts.

Seeing how business is done in the buzzing Silicon Valley business environment will be exciting and educational. The trip will include visits to local startups, as well success stories. We will meet local VCs and lawyers, and some successful Finnish entrepreneurs in the area.

The trip is important in many respects.  Taking Aalto University students to see how one of the world’s best university technology ventures programs works will show us how things could be done, and be a lesson in what we need to do to change the university’s culture.

Aaltoes is using the week to build our relationship with our Stanford University counterpart BASES. We will workshop on how to get students involved in startups, and what kind of needs student entrepreneurs have and how to best support them.

Of course there is also time to relax and socialize, the week finishes with the biggest party of the year, Halloween, and we have many mixers and dinners were we will get to meet entrepreneurs and students.

The programme  is due to changes, the most recent changes can be seen at the Google Calender

MONDAY
Technology and Teams
How the Stanford’s Technology Transfer system works and how the university supports students’ entrepreneurship ambitions.

TUESDAY
Startups
Visiting Berkeley University and upcoming startups.

WEDNESDAY
Angels, VCs and Lawyers.
What it really takes to get funding for your ideas. Meeting VCs and lawyers to get a look inside their business.

THURSDAY
Big companies, exits.
What international success looks like.

FRIDAY
Summing it all up.
Visits to Y-combinator and other interesting forms of support for early stage startups.