FreshNetworks Blog

Our last two days on Web Mission 09 ended with a visit to Web2.0 Expo and a couple of great parties (or networking events as I prefer to call them when talking to my wife).

Web2.0 Expo was definitely quiter than I had imagined and the feedback from people who’d been before was that it failed to live up to previous years. Having said that, despite the recession they still managed to get 8,000 Web-heads along.

Some of the best talks included:

1. Content Strategy, What’s real, what’s relevant - a good reminder that content strategy is an important part of any site, from a blog to a fully-blown enterprise social network or community. By Kristina Halvorsen
2. Effective Twitter for Communication and Product integration – including how companies are incorporating Twitter into their products
3. Designing Social Websites, Christina Wodkte – a few tips on how to plan for and design an online comunity or social website
4. What Would the Community Manager do? – Anyone who helps educate around the importance of professional community management is good in my book.

On thursday night the Web Mission crew was lucky enough to be invited to Michael and Xochi Birch’s fantastic new house [founders of Bebo]. If you ever wondered what life’s like after you sell a company for $850M, then you should have been there. It was an amazing place with fantastic views over the bay.

It was a relatively small gathering, yet among a crowd that included Craigslist’s CEO Jim Buckmaster and other notable Valley entrepreneurs, I happened to bump into two FreshMinds One’s to Watch. In case you don’t know, our sister business runs a recruitment programme every year in the UK to uncover the country’s most proimising young talent. We interview thousands of graduates across 10 universities to identify a small list of Ones to Watch. Often they are picked out by their peers as being special because they have done something truely exceptional at university. So it is perhaps not by coincidence that two of them (who quite seperately moved to SF to launch start-ups) happened to be at the party.

For our final night on tour we were invited to the British Consule General’s house in San Francisco. This was yet another excellent opportunity to network organised by UK Trade and Investment. Attendees ranged from successful entrepreneurs (e.g. Max Levchin, founder of Slide) to VCs, press and Silicon Valley “connectors”. I think we all felt that we’d made a few more connections that will help propel our companies forward.

Conclusion and Thanks
The Web Mission was a fantastic way to get under the skin of Silicon Valley in a short-time, to make some very useful connections and to share experiences with other UK entrepreneurs. Thank you to everyone who was involved in making it happen. In particular:

• Oli Barratt
• James Lawn, Polecat
• Orrick, an excellent law firm for helping UK firms do business in America
• Dilhani Palehepitiya, Oracle
• UK Trade and Investment
• Susan Best, of Best PR
• Michael and Xochi Birch
• Alex van Someren