Yesterday I got a word that Everyplay, Floobs and Arctic Startup managed to get him to Helsinki and he’s giving a workshop on 10th of November. The event is targeted only for entrepreneurs currently running startups and this means mainly CEOs, CTOs and founders. There’s limited amount of seats and price per ticket is 20€.

Luckily the editors at Arctic Startup  were nice enough to share few tickets to be given to Aaltoes members. Here’s how you can win one:

• Comment to Twitter “Aaltoes goes to Silicon Valley. Updates @ http://aaltoes.com RT and win tickets to see Eric Rise http://bit.ly/J9twf” and post a comment to this page with your Twitter account

or

• Share Aaltoes Stanford trip page in Facebook to your friends with note “Aaltoes goes to Silicon Valley. Spread the word and win a ticket to see Eric Rise http://bit.ly/J9twf” and post a comment to this page with your Facebook account

We’ll select the winners of those who participated before 29th of October 23:59 (Finnish time)

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.

I’m starting off with a light subject – just a few picks and notes about a company that has become a daily part of many of our lives in recent years – Facebook.

During my stay here in Palo Alto, CA I’m living in College Terrace which is a very compact neighbourhood located right next to the Stanford University campus. Facebook is relocating its operations to a large office building just a few blocks away. As a community outreach effort, the company opened their doors for a few hours last Monday and gave people living in the area a glimpse of their new space.

For the past few years Facebook has been operating in several different building scattered around Palo Alto. Now that they’re relocating all 900 employees under the same roof, it will be interesting too see what effect, if any, it has on their operations. You’d expect that having people located closer together, especially with the type of open office plan they’ve chosen, would have a positive impact on communication and information flow.

We didn’t know exactly what to expect from the open house, but we had been promised free food prepared by Facebook’s head chef. Secretly I was hoping for the opportunity to discuss Facebook’s business model with CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but I wasn’t that suprised to see that there weren’t many actual Facebook employees around. We got a very friendly greeting by people dressed in Facebook t-shirts at the main door. Other than the employees, the only evidence that we were in the right place was the large Facebook-blue rug at the entrance.

Welcome to Facebook

Otherwise, the 150,000 sq ft building was rather empty. Most of the furniture had not been moved in yet. The space was light and spacious, but it didn’t make a big impression as the headquarters of one of the world’s largest social networking sites. A friend commented that it was pretty “IKEA-like”, hopefully the employees moving in later this week will bring a touch of flavour with them.

Empty office space waiting for employees to move in

The food (sushi, cookies, olives, cheese, stuffed jalopenos, chicken fingers and other fried food) was good and the drinks free. I enjoyed a Facebook-sponsored beer and noted that many people seemed to have brought their whole family there for dinner. There was nice family-friendly, community feeling to the place with kids running around and people lining up for second helpings. The event was much like pre-house warming party. Do Finnish companies host these types of events for their neighbours?

All in all it was worth a visit, even though HQ didn’t quite live up to my expectations. The Facebook employees stationed as greeters at the front entrance seemed relieved to see all their visitors leaving and jokingly reminded me to “shutdown my MySpace account” as I passed them to exit.