Stanford EntrepreneurEntrepreneurship isn’t a career, it’s a way of life

Discovering Entrepreneurship - Field Trip to Plug And PlayFiled Under: class, entrepreneurship

Today, for class, we went to Plug and Play Tech Center (PnP) for a field trip. For startups in the Silicon Valley area, this is a really cool place to go and get all the resources you need to get going. I have personally enjoyed the idea of an incubator since I lived in South Dakota, but in order to fully appreciate the benefits, you have to be from a place that has a bunch of startups so that the place can be utilized (unlike South Dakota right now…) Here’s a quick run down of what we did.

What’s the Story?

The first center was opened in 2006 in Sunnyvale and is host to 130 startups. They range from one person teams all the way up to 50 person teams. In October of 2007, another center opened in Redwood City and sometime this March a Palo Alto center should open. The great thing about these places is that they offer all of the services a startup would need in terms of office space and provide the flexibility of month to month leasing that a startup would like to see. They have raised over $350 million in venture capital for their businesses and acts as the one-stop-shop for entrepreneurs and investors.

University Entrepreneurs Welcome

One of the really exciting things about this place is that they have a startup bootcamp for college entrepreneurs where they can try out their business idea with all of the resources PnP has to offer. They have connections with Stanford, UC-Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, and Cornell. In order to test your business, there is an application on the website to fill out. Very cool and something I will look at for the future…

Midomi

While at PnP, we had a presentation done by one of the startups called Midomi. They have developed an amazing technology that allows people to sing/hum parts of a song into a microphone and then figure out the name of the song (for those who have something stuck in their head but can’t remember who sang the song, this is for you.) They have two former Stanford Ph. D. students on the team and from their graduate work they learned and developed this phenomenal speech and music recognition technology. It was so good that they even won the BASES business plan competition! If you want to check out their website and see if you can find a song yourself, go here.

Conclusion

This trip was pretty cool and I learned a lot about one particular resource available to startups. If I had a business that would benefit from an incubator, I would definitely consider a facility like PnP. The idea of putting a bunch of startups really makes sense and provides value for everyone involved.  The startups have all the resources they need in terms of writing a better plan, executing their idea, IT resources, building a board, and even getting financing. For investors, having a central hub that decides which startups are worthy of incubating and having a close relationship with those startups proves invaluable to the investors because they can receive all of the necessary information to find good investment choices.