By Alex Garcia (Co-President of Kai)
This year marked the 13th iteration of Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford (SVCO) and the energy and lineup was as impressive as ever. For these two days a mix of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors, and leaders along with Oxford community members from all over the world converged on the Said Business School campus.
The first day of SVCO comprised of an opening key-note by Bob Goodson followed by “20-20” sessions (20 minute presentation with 20 minutes of questions). The next day followed a similar format with sessions lasting an hour each. The lineup of this year’s speakers was incredible, and this made choosing which sessions to go to incredibly difficult. I’ll only be able to share the takeaways for the ones I had the fortune of attending, but these should be more than enough to get some inspiration for tackling your ideas. Below are the sessions I attended, and I will be writing posts for most of them over the next few days. Stay tuned!
•Sonny Vu’s (Founder and CEO of Misfit) talk “10 Lessons from Failure and How I’m Going to Build My Next Company”- Notes Here.
•Reshma Sohoni’s (Partner at Seedcamp) talk “A Whole Lot of Change: The Evolution of Europe’s Funding Landscape”
•Leilah Janah’s (Founder and CEO of Sama Group) talk “Reimagining Relief: Social Justice in the Tech Age”- Notes Here.
•Brendan Baker’s (Ex - Angel's List and Greylock) talk “Anatomy of a Seed: What does a $1m Seed Round look like from the Inside, How does it work and What does it Reveal about how VC is changing?”
•Phil Libin’s (CEO of Evernote) talk “Building a Brand to Last 100 Years”
•Morten Lund’s (Serial Entrepreneur and Angel Investor) talk “Tools to Break Through With Your Idea”
•Kim Polese’s (Chairman, ClearStreet) talk “How Machine Learning is Transforming the Speed of Innovation”