Education

is the passport to the future,

for tomorrow belongs to those who
prepare for it today. Malcolm X

San Francisco
Where big ideas become reality.

Guillaume Standaert | 2 IBM 01 | 2016

Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 3
Stanford University ........................................................................................................................ 4
Peace Innovation ........................................................................................................................ 4
Yelp ................................................................................................................................................ 6
Runway .......................................................................................................................................... 6
WeedClub .................................................................................................................................. 7
VillageDefense ........................................................................................................................... 7
Mixerevent in San Francisco ........................................................................................................... 8
Vive La Tarte .............................................................................................................................. 8
Sparkcentral ............................................................................................................................... 8
Showpad .................................................................................................................................... 9
Belcham ......................................................................................................................................... 9
Bootstraplabs ............................................................................................................................... 10

Introduction

A warm summer breeze blows through my hair when I am visiting some shops at Fishermans
Wharf. When I walk through this area with its typical types of shops, I feel incredibly relaxed. The
summer feeling makes me smile. While Justin Biebers new hits are blasting through the speakers,
the idea reaches my brain that I finally am visiting America for the first time. Something I already
wanted for a long time! I am finally here in San Francisco, the place where the technological
development of products is at the highest level of the world.
A lot of people come here to build on their success, and somehow, I have the feeling that this is why I
am here as well

Extract of my personal diary

Entrepreneurship is defined as the gift to be able to succeed in starting up your own business.
Furthermore, it exists out of being able to keep the company working and to be able to generate
profit. These three pillars make up the fact that you are successful in the business that you are
conducting. If one of these goals are not accomplished in a certain period of time, your business will
get into problems. Good managerial skills are therefore of the utmost importance.

The reason of this study trip was to get insights in the fast moving world where different companies
are starting as a start-up. This document shows in a few pages what this study trip has done to me
and how this has influenced my personal entrepreneurial thinking.

Guillaume Standaert

YOU HAVE TO SURROUND YOU PEOPLE WHO ARE BETTER THAN YOU IN A CERTAIN THING. THEN
YOU WILL BE SUCCESFULL. VIVE LA TARTE.

Figure 0 - A picture of me with the skyline of San Francisco behind me.

It was a wonderful study trip!

Stanford University

Stanford University is one of the top 5 universities in the world and
the United States. The campus is situated approximately 60 km out
of the center of San Francisco. Situated very close to Palo Alto yet
does not belong to Palo Alto as the university has its own name
Stanford within Santa Clara County. (Wikipedia.org)

The university has a huge importance in technological development
and its research and development. Their education is of a very high
level, therefore an application has to be done and accepted on the
basis of intellectual background. Easily said, when youre not smart
enough, Stanford wont let you in.

Entrance fee for this university is - in accordance with its status of
one of the best universities in the world incredibly high. For a
year, you have to be able to pay 65.000 dollar. Without costs of
books and food included. However, when you do have the brains to Figure 1 - Stanford University logo
study here, yet you dont possess the financial matters, Stanford
still allows you to study here for free. This has been told to me by Professor Mark Nelson, CoDirector of the Peace Innovation Lab where I followed a workshop on Peace Innovation about which
I will talk about later on in this document.

The total amount of money spend on a yearly basis for research and development is to what I still
remember - 1.33 billion dollars. A huge amount. It seems that this amount is gathered from private
investors and not paid by the US Government as there are no subsidies provided for this university.

As Stanford University explains: From Nobel Prize winners to undergraduates, all members of the
Stanford community are engaged in creating new knowledge, and Stanford brings an innovative,
entrepreneurial spirit to this work of discovery. Stanford people take on audacious problems, bring
imaginative new approaches to solving them, and work collaboratively to advance knowledge and
make meaningful contributions to our world. (Stanford University)

They aim to improve the world - this in various types of doing so - in developing new technologies
and new ways of thinking. A nice example is the story of 2 engineers who studied at Stanford,
named William Hewlett and David Packard, worked on their first prototype in their garage at home.
This was the basis of the company HP (HewlettPackard) as we all know it today. These engineers
gathered their knowledge and created something new and unique. This has lead to the
establishment of a new company that created many jobs around the whole world.

Peace Innovation
Currently innovation seems to be of the utmost importance when conducting business. When you
do not make progress, you have the risk on staying on the same spot as you were last week, last
month, last year and so on. In this situation, your company is not improving.

In a situation where your company is not improving at all, you are doomed to failure. Therefore, a
constant way of innovating different processes and innovating different ways of conducting your
business are important to let your company grow the natural way.

Innovating processes, starts first of all with innovating your way of thinking. If you keep thinking the
old fashioned way, probably failure stands behind you. Stanford University is very much known for

their way of innovation and innovative trains of thought. A new project started by Mark Nelson is
the idea op peace innovation, a subject that will become much more important in the near future as
companies have to deal with different problems.

Each company once encounters
problems in different levels of their
What target
communities?
business. To succeed in solving these
problems in a decent way the idea of
Optimize (or
peace innovation comes in mind. How to
What tech do
pivot) and
they use?
repeat.
solve problems in a way that it solves the
problem for everyone that has to deal
with it? Many businesses lose profit
because of conflicts in production
processes, dealing with different people,
How many
What
etc. Peace innovation is a new way of
behaviours?
behaviour?
thinking developed at Stanford
University that will become more and
What will we
more important. I am sure of that!
build to test?

During the workshop we had we had
Figure 2 - Rapid Prototyping Loop
some exercises on how to apply this
peace theory to different business
processes, and how to innovate them. We learned how to use the Rapid Prototyping Loop, a type of
scheme which helps you guide through the problem and solving it. See scheme above.

To be honest, it was interesting as this way of thinking was really new to me, however, I think I will
definitely use the scheme in my future career!

Figure 3 - Peace Innovation group with Mark Nelson

Yelp
Founded in 2004, Yelp is a company that is known for their
reviews. The whole idea of Yelp started when the founder of
the company once was on a holiday and in decent need of a
dentist. He started calling his friends to ask for good dentists
at reasonable price in the neighbourhood. After an hour he
got almost 20 replies with good dentists all over the city with
Figure 4 - Yelp logo
different service wages. That was the moment that Yelp was
founded. How nice would it be to get reviews of restaurants,
bars, hairstylists, made by the locals, as they are the ones who make usage of their services the most
of the time. Who else than the locals could give better reviews? No one. Thats in a short story how
the idea of Yelp was founded.

Nowadays Yelp is one of the biggest reviewing companies and one of the most reliable ones as well
as reliability is very important for them.

Each person who has a certain type of business can make a business account on which he posts
pictures and explains what his business is about. Further, the people who visit his business can
review his service and give feedback. What makes it so reliable, is the fact that the business owner is
not able to delete the negative comments or change them a bit. So when someone is not happy with
the service that was provided, he can post a review and the review will stay there until forever.
However, if someone takes over a business and can prove that a lot of the original business has
changed, the whole amount of reviews can be asked to delete and the business owner can start over
again with gathering new and hopefully very good reviews.

Yelp is a company that is doing very great as they are developing very fast. The company is growing
at an unknown pace and is headquartered in a lot of countries all around the world.

Although it seems very easy to just go to a country and start up your business as you are doing it in
your home country, it is not as easy as it seems. Sometimes you have to adapt your product, in this
way a review service, to your guest country. In Japan they had to adapt fully to the wishes of the
customers there. Certainly when it was about rating someone. In Japan rating something with 3 stars
is the ultimate minimum. Therefore, the reviews are way higher and they had to spilt their stars into
more parts. Thats why you can find a business that is rated 3 stars.

What I have learned at Yelp, is that it is very important to know your market before moving to that
country. Some critical research definitely has to be conducted before you can decide to move
whether or not. Furthermore, I have learned that Yelp makes it very relaxed to work. They want to
create an open workspace with free drinks and snacks. The idea behind this concept is well found: If
the employees can have snacks, food and drinks on the campus, then they do not have to leave the
office and then they can stay focused and productive.

Runway

As every company - even the biggest companies nowadays - start very small, it was very interesting
to visit Runway Incubator during the Silicon Valley study trip. Runway Incubator is a company
situated in the Twitter building in San Francisco and is giving working space for start up companies.
The place they have developed is a place where ideas can easily be exchanged and where small
startups can help other startups in their development.

When we entered the Twitter building, the extravagance of the big American buildings was
overwhelming us, again. Large entrance halls leading to a corridor with 4 elevators that might bring
you to the right floor. Runway Incubator provided us with a presentation of the current startups that
were working in their work space. When we entered their territory, they did not seem surprised of
seeing us. They just kept on working. After a short introduction to the company when we were
walking through the whole department we were able to take a seat in a lets call it an auditorium.
There a few startups presented their new ideas to us.

WeedClub
The first company that was presented was WeedClub. WeedClub is a
startup that aims to legalize Weed to be able to start using Weed as a
medicine. They have done quite some research and have found out
that for some people epileptically people for example weed might
be a good treatment for their disease. Scientifical research has been
done and the results are very surprising!

WeedClub describes themselves as: WeedClub is an exclusive
membership based B2B network for the legitimate cannabis industry
and the only professional network bringing together the cannabis
Figure 5 - WeedClub, one of the
industry with tech investors. (Eventbrite.com, 2015)
companies presented during our
Runway visit.

As you can see, they are a company that wants to build up a network
of Weed sellers in a professional way, yet they need big companies to invest in them. WeedClub
furthermore declares that the Weed industry is the new trend and will be a huge success in the near
future.

If you are a vendor, WeedClub offers you safe networking with people who want to expand their
business in an easy yet legal way!

VillageDefense
Another company that was presented to us was VillageDefense. VillageDefense is company that
started out of the idea that we are
never safe anymore in this world.
If a burglary is happening in your
area and the police is called, they
often arrive too late as their
Figure 6 - Another company presented to us during our Runway visit.
transport takes a lot of time as
well. Next to that, the neighbors
often dont know something happened.

Now, when there would be a system, with which you can use an app to let everyone in the area
know that a burglary is happening at that particular moment and that immediately calls the police as
well, much time would be won as the different steps of warning the neighbors, calling the police etc.
would not have been necessary.

VillageDefense came up with this idea and is also using Runways workspace to develop their
company at the fastest pace.

Further, two other companies presented their projects, but I will not go into detail about them as for
me these two projects above were the most interesting for me personally.

After the presentations, we were supposed to have dinner there, paid by Runway. The pizza boy
arrived a bit to early so we were able to eat pizzas during the presentations. It was fun! Afterwards
we were able to talk with the people who presented their startup and exchange ideas and do some
networking. It was interesting to hear from these experienced people by now to learn what you
should really think of when starting up a business. Although it seems very easy to do so, starting up a
business goes with highs and lows

Mixerevent in San Francisco

Vive La Tarte
Tuesday evening, after a very sunny and informative day of visiting Alcatraz, we had a mixer event at
Vive La Tarte, a Belgian start-up that started in San Francisco by the idea of 2 Belgians.

Arnaud Goethals en Julie Vandermeersch, the
founders of this company, went on honeymoon to
San Francisco. During this honeymoon trip, they
noticed that San Fran was in decent need of a
good tarts bakery. When they arrived back home,
they started thinking about the future and as they
both wanted to change jobs, the decided to both
quit jobs immediatly and to open their own bakery
in San Francisco.

Having no knowledge about pastries and baking
herself, Julie had to go and work with a Belgian
baker for some time. They wanted him to move
Figure 7 - Julie Vandermeersch and Arnaud Goethals,
founders of Vive La Tarte.
together with them to start working in San
Francisco. At first he was very happy to move to
San Francisco, but when the deadline was coming closer and closer he took the decision to stay
home. What followed was that Julie had to start baking herself, and manage the bakery without
professional baker beside her. An incredible stressful moment!

The company was founded with no venture capital, but with the money of Julie and Arnaud
themselves. During this mixer event they talked to us about the whole start-up story they had been
through, about how the company was evolving and about their future, places they want to go to
with their company in later stages of business development.
(Vive La Tarte)

Sparkcentral
When talking about the financial aspects and venture
capitalism, we can say as already previously mentioned
that Vive La Tarte was founded with no funding nor venture
capitalism. However, two other Belgian start-ups did make
usage of venture capitalism. The first company was
Sparkcentral. (Sparkcentral)

Sparkcentral is a company founded by Davy Kestens, a
Belgian guy that now lives and works in San Francisco. His
company Sparkcentral develops software for companies
that connect companies to their clients and on the contrary
connect clients to the companies they are using/buying/

Figure 8 - Davy Kestens, founder of

Sparkcentral.


During the whole process of customer relationship marketing, it is of the utmost importance to keep
in touch with you clients, however, nowadays different social media exist next to the ordinary
communication technologies. Sparkcentral also gives you the opportunity to be able to manage
these types of media in a very easy way.
Their goals are very easy. On their website, Sparkcentral describes their own goals as the following:
For customers, they want to:
Make it easy for your customers to reach you and provide them with amazing service
regardless of the way they contact you.

For agents they want to:
Maximize customer satisfaction with a tool built to help you easily resolve customer
issues.

For managers he wants to:
Measure customer satisfaction, track team performance, and use your data to optimize
your teams productivity. (Sparkcentral)

Davy Kestens mentioned some very smart things during this mixer event. First of all he thought
investing in your people is important because working with well educated people makes processes
go faster and working goes more efficiently. There is always the risk of losing a worker where you
have invested in by giving him extra educations. But not extra educating your people makes your
business processes go slower and thats losing capital as well. He also mentiones that he always had
been able to grow throughout his career and he wants that his people get the same chances.

Furthermore, you should be very happy that other companies want to buy that person because it is
a positive thing that that guy is getting chances to improve his career, something we will certainly do
as well. Being rewarded for things you are doing great is necessary he says to keep people focused.

Next to that he said it is very important to start think about a hole in the market. If you have the
idea, you can start up a business and make people develop what you have in mind. No one will be
able to be successful in all business related tasks. Then you should hire people who are better in a
task then you are. These people will do the work for you and you just have to pay them, while they
make you big.

Showpad
Showpad was the third and last company present during the mixer event. The company was founded
in Ghent, Belgium in 2011 by Pieterjan Bouten, Louis Jonckheere and Peter Minne.

Showpad has developed an online platform and an app that are linked to each other. The handy
thing is that the online platform is a direct link from the marketing department to the sales
department.
All internal information can be put on the platform and the app that Showpad provides makes it
easy to see al the latest marketing information and sales figures and numbers. Furthermore, with
the online platform you are able to gain insights on content usage and gather feedback from users.

Belcham
Belcham is the abbreviation for Belgian-American Chamber of Commerce and is a non-profit
organization that wants to help Belgians starting up a business in America so they become successful
in this new country. Additionally, they offer a wide range of lectures, workshops and extra

educational background. Furthermore, Belcham also is the place to get more information about
getting settled down in the USA for an internship. (Belcham)

Its important to know that we learned what Belcham was during the AWS Pop-Up loft visit. It was
interesting to learn that some organizations such as Belcham exist to facilitate the movement from
Belgium to the United States.

Furthermore, I had the same feeling as when we visited yelp, a big and open working space where
free drinks and food were provided by the company itself. I thought that these types of work offices
should be more implemented in the business offices we know here in Belgium nowadays. It makes
people feel at ease while working and it also keeps people at work to be able te keep them focused.
If they do not have to leave the building they keep focused, even when taking a small pause and
drinking a coffee with some colleagues. (Belcham)

Bootstraplabs
When visiting BootstrapLabs, we were visiting the last company for our study trip. To be honest, I
thought this was a very interesting lecture as we had to deal with venture capitalism and the whole
financial aspect of starting up a business and how to fund it.

Venture capitalism is defined as a type of capital that brings a lot of risk with it. Venture capitalists
are people that are investing huge amounts of money in new companies and start-ups that need
new money to be able to grow. In return for the invested capital the investors get some shares in the
company and hope that their investments are worth the effort. After the company is big enough and
has made big steps ahead, the owners can buy out the other shareholders here seen as the
primary venture capitalists.

For the venture
capitalists it thus is a
game in which they
hope their money to
grow, in a very risky
process, because
investing in a wrong
company means a
huge financial loss.
Therefore, venture
capitalism is very risky,
but if you have the
knowhow and a bit of
luck, you can earn lots
Figure 9 - Different terms that are related to Venture Capital.
of money!

BootstrapLabs is a venture capitalist company and is mostly interested in companies working around
Artificial Intelligence. They think that this is the future and will be a big success. Therefore, they
prefer to invest in companies that develop these types of technologies. To end, this is a last thing the
company would tell: We are agnostic when it comes to where you are currently located as a
founder, and truly believe some of the most exciting innovations happen at the edges, but our
founders always run and build their companies from Silicon Valley post investment as we know it is
the best ecosystem in the world to build and scale innovative technology companies.
(BootstrapLabs)

Bibliography

Belcham. (n.d.). About us. Retrieved April 16, 2016, from Belcham.org:
https://www.belcham.org/about

Belcham. (n.d.). Start-ups. Retrieved from Belcham.com: https://www.belcham.org/startup

BootstrapLabs. (n.d.). About us. Retrieved April 15, 2016, from BootstrapLabs.com:
http://bootstraplabs.com/about-us/

Eventbrite.com. (2015, december 9). Retrieved april 10, 2016, from @420 PITCH by WEEDCLUB:
Friends in High Places!: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/420sm-pitch-by-weedclub-friends-in-highplaces-tickets-19702637118

Sparkcentral. (n.d.). Company. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from Sparkcentral.com:
http://www.sparkcentral.com/company/

Sparkcentral. (n.d.). Product. Retrieved April 16, 2016, from Sparkcentral.com:
http://www.sparkcentral.com/product/

Stanford University. (n.d.). Research. Retrieved April 6, 2016, from Stanford University:
https://www.stanford.edu/research/

Vive La Tarte. (n.d.). Hello. Retrieved April 17, 2016, from vivelatarte.com:
http://vivelatarte.com/hello.php

Wikipedia.org. (n.d.). Stanford University. Retrieved April 18, 2016, from Wikipedia.org:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University