Last April I had the chance to visit the Silicon Valley. I met several senior business men and women in the IT industry. This was my first time in the bay area for business and I would like to share some takeaways from this roadshow.

I am pleased to say that I got plenty of support from the Mexican consulate in San Jose, and ProMexico, federal government agency responsible for coordinating strategies aimed at strengthening Mexico’s participation in the international economy.

Let’s get started…

I travelled back and forth from San Jose, CA to the cities of Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, up to San Francisco. I am convinced that in order to provide value to a potential client you need to understand their “habitat” and business dynamics, otherwise you might just shoot to the wrong place.

The weather? Fantastic, during the whole week the temperature average was around 20º Celsius.
When I arrived at the San Jose airport and went to the car rentals I was received with the surprise that my drivers license from Mexico had expired, so I needed to find another way to travel all those cities having a tight schedule of at least 10 meetings all in different places within a 4 day timeframe, so this was actually the best opportunity to travel like a local, using Caltrain and Uber.

The people that I met with during my roadshow were:
Carlos Ponce – Consulate General of Mexico, San José, CA
Marco Gonzalez – Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Office SANMINA
Bismarck Lepe – Founder and CEO at Wizeline, Board Member at Soccerly
Federico Andrade – Sr DevOps Engineer at RocketFuel
Mario Valle – Director Business Development at EA (Electronic Arts) Emerging Markets
Fernando Fonseca – Business Advisor at Weber and Company, Inc.
Leandro Margulis – Director, Global Strategic Partnerships at Quixey
Saeed Amidi – Founder and CEO at Plug and Play Tech Center
Jackie Hernandez – VP of Operations at Plug and Play Tech Center
Connie Bianco – Director of Service Partnerships at Plug and Play Tech Center
Alex Cobos – International Relations Manager at Plug and Play Tech Center
Pablo Solano – Partner at Mita Ventures and Tech Accelerator
Andreas Kraemer – Senior Partner at Mita Ventures and Tech Accelerator
Carlo Kraemer – Managing Director at CENAK Consulting

I’ll be sharing in my next blog the great conversation I had with the co-founder of Ooyala and current CEO of Wizeline, Bismarck Lepe, a serial entrepreneur that loves Guadalajara and plays golf with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Till next time

By: Eduardo Campos