To stay or not to stay? Having written very little during our trip to California, we have accumulated the cast of emotions and impressions that have survived cold Kyiv days. To put it briefly, it was great. The trip has truly changed us to the better (and Foodle too). We really want to thank Happy Farm Business Incubator and Imperious Group, especially Bozhena Sheremeta and Yuriy Romanyukha for pointing us in the direction of applying to Lion Farm. It was 100% worth it. Will we recommend it to others? Hell yeah) Special thank you goes to the whole Happy Farm team that made it possible and executed the program despite many obstacles - thanks a lot Anna Degtereva, Alena Kalibaba, Алена Новгородская, Danuta Pisarenko, Valeriy Gontarenko, Alexandra Smelyanskaya, Oleg Afanasyev, Sofi Shvets, Mamyko Ekaterina, Maruzhenko Veronika, Anton Karpenko, Vitaliy Tsybankov, Елена Нестерчук and everyone else who helped make it real. And. of course, +1 goes to Павел Алешин ;) We truly appreciate mentors, advisers and investors that took their time to share experience and wisdom with us, gave critical reviews to our ideas and projects. Thank you Igor Shoifot with his irrepressible passion, John Gower with his vast marketing experience and product understanding, Sridhar Solur with his vision for the future of tech, Vitaly M. Golomb (what is the problem? who is your customer?), Roman Kostochka & Kate Seledets with Coursmos Courses, Alex Fishman with his precious Dishero, Andrey Kolodyuk and the whole of Aventures, Max Gurvits, Kaushal Chokshi, Павел Черкашин, Robert Andres Schwentker, Odet Hermon, Madeline Duva, Виктор Шабуров, Jim Smith, Tim Draper, Daniel Morris, Max Skibinsky, Artem Gassan, Julian Zegelman, Gigi Wang and Ziv Gillat: your successes inspire us and your failures teach us how to avoid mistakes. It is often said that the main value proposition of each and every business incubator is the network of its graduates. Foodle team has been lucky enough to land in the batch with all these wonderful people and (almost) very successful founders: Rashid Aliyev with Bethclip, Yaroslav Mudryi with Mitten, Alexej Spas and Andrey Vakunov with Exclusivio, Victor Nikonets and Sergey Shukaylo with Happy Tom, Аленка Кухарева, Вова Чернишов and Андрей Приходченко (Andrew Pryhodchenko) with Sportamba, Anton Gerasymenko and Oleg Saturn with Audaster, Victor Kopach with Pet-register, Vlad Sheykman, Дмитрий Шила and Макс Семенчук with ARQuest, Aleksandr Zozovsky and Alexander Tatsenko with Pulssoft, Yaroslav Osetrov with Dental Cloud. We are looking forward to the very fruitful cooperation with all of you guys! P.S. Super special thank you goes to Sergey Ivashov from PayPal for taking us surfing. Dreams come true in SV! P.P.S. Not to turn this post into a huge thank you note (pretend it hasn’t yet), we have cooked for you a few interesting things we’ve noticed out there. Here is our list: 1. There are A LOT of bums in San Francisco. Looks like more than in Kyiv. One of the legends says that it is due to the high concentration of startups, 99% of which usually fail :) 2. To support this legend there is a statistics that say there is approximately 1 startup established in SV every minute. 3. Almost all of SF bums hang out in the city center. Why not move them to some poor suburbs? We’ve been wondering until it turned out there really aren’t many poor suburbs out there. Suburbs are for wealthy people that can afford their own house. Multi-apartment buildings aren’t cool - they are for the poor. Cool kids own their own houses :) 4. High levels of tolerance to other people, be it a reason or a result of aforementioned peculiarities, has led to the emergence of a truly special mix. LGBT, black, hispanic and other communities are very numerous, so as are all freaks and geeks. And the local government has actually allowed smoking marijuana despite it being forbidden by the Federal Government. That’s what they cal local governance, b**ch! 5. With all this being said, Silicon Valley is flooded with money. It’s not that uncommon to get a few millions of dollars in funding when you have a great idea and a team to execute it. 6. And last, but not least, people here do believe, that it’s possible to change the world. To make it better. All you’ve got to do is to aspire and work towards your goal. There are 14 people on Instagram team. 14 for 200 millions active users. How about that? P.P.P.S. Writing from my page to be able to tag you all. Thanks!
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 19:31:46 +0000
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