What you can learn from CanvasFlip’s experience at Blackbox and Silicon Valley-
- CanvasFlip was invited to participate in Blackbox #13, a 2 week acceleration program powered by Google. As co-founders, Manish and Vipul got an opportunity to visit the bay area and stay at Palo Alto - center of the startup universe.
- It was their first visit to the bay area and this experience gave them a lot of learning which we believe, can be very useful for fellow startups.
We have Vipul Mishra, co-founder of CanvasFlip who has experienced all himself at the Blackbox Connect #13.
And here he goes….
Invitation to Blackbox-
(Day -1 Blackbox welcome and ice breaking session)
Why “Silicon Valley” is NOT a hype-
- Every successful SaaS startup is selling to the US market and even if you are not a SaaS startup you should try to expand to the US market. I’ll explain why and most importantly how.
- They have seen unicorns - Silicon valley being home to world’s most popular innovations including Apple, Google, HP has witnessed lots of success stories. Palo Alto, Mountain view and Menlo Park alone hosts more startups than in India. Probably that is why investors and mentors are encouraged to take risk in upcoming startups.
(legendary Steve Job’s house )
- Startup is main stream We spent few days at some of the prestigious universities including Stanford, Singularity and let me tell you that the graduates are not looking for a higher package in a well known organization, instead they are all busy in building the next big thing (almost all of them). We are observing this trend here in IITs and IIMs but it’s yet to become mainstream (hoping that to happen soon!).
- Events. Networking. Evangelism. Silicon Valley is very enthusiastic and active about organising events. Both in terms of frequency as well as the crowd turn-around. Events are not just business card exchange but also, entrepreneurs sharing ideas to work together. If a mentor likes what you are doing, they will churn out a use case and give you access to a network and shout-out about your product.
Silicon Valley culture -
- Reachability People are super reachable, if you wish to reach someone, send them a “tweet” with a link to your product/demo and they will respond almost instantly. In just 2 weeks, we met more than 50-60 mentors, investors and other marquee people in our domain.
(Spending quality time with Amir Shevat, Director of developers relations at Slack )
- Instant decisions, no “maybe” This is the best part. We did not have to go through repeated demos. At the valley, it went much faster. Every meeting/call ended with a decision. They either bought the product and suggested improvisation (after which they purchase) or stated very clearly that it wasn’t for them. Everybody respects their own time and entrepreneurs’ time.
- They have the money I feel, US customers have more buying power than anywhere else in the world. They have the budget dedicated to trying new solutions and products.
How to get into BlackBox-
- Blackbox asks for recommendations from partner organization. In India, NASSCOM is their ecosystem partner.
- Usually, NASSCOM sends 5-6 recommendations to them after which an Skype interview is scheduled with one of the blackbox core team member and they shortlist one startup from each country.
- Recommendation from a blackboxer (participants, partners, mentors) or networks like Headstart, Google For Entrepreneurs etc will make you very likely to get into the program.
- If you don’t have access to any of the above, I’ll recommend you to Blackbox…
What to expect from BlackBox?
- BlackBox is a 2 weeks extensive residential program where you have many mentors, VCs and expert from different domain come and speak about their experience in valley.
(Manish and Vipul spending a usual mentorship session at Blackbox)
- Blackbox is concluded by a product showcase and startup pitch followed by QnA in front of Silicon Valley crowd.
- Startup pitch is hosted by jury consisting VCs, successful entrepreneurs and mentors from every domain.
- Blackbox is such an amazing team. Most of them have startup experience so they understand strength and weakness of starting up and guide accordingly.
- But the best part is from peer-learning. Very rarely, you will have more than 15 founders from 10-15 countries under one roof so, you get unique opportunity to understand startup culture, cost of setting up, engineering and marketing.
Surprize Learnings-
- One of the best part of Blackbox experience is working with Google team. As a blackboxer, you get access to Google Venture, Google Campus (acceleration program by Google) and Google For Entrepreneurs.
- You also get to work with Googlers who help in product, UX, security, finance, fund-raise everything.
- Apart from usual indoor mentoring sessions and workshop. We got an opportunity to visit NASA (yes, NASA!!) and Singularity University to peek into future of technologies.
- A half day discussion with Pascal was an eye opener. It showed that future is here. If you wish to succeed, you’ll have to build for future.
“As I sign off, I wish all my fellow entrepreneurs luck to succeed with their big ideas. Stay in touch folks!”