My initial trip to the US will be from January 2nd to March 31st, which just about scrapes inside the 90-day limit of my tourist visa..
I’m flying out with one of my co-founders, Amir, and will be staying with the other co-founder, Pat, who has a house in San Francisco here.
The reason we’re going out to the west coast rather than staying here in England is that we’ve got backing from a group of investors out there, who run semiannual programs in which new companies fight it out to get further funding at the end of the three month period.
We think this will be really useful because:
- There’s a competitive aspect to it – we’re trying to be better than the other guys in order to get that funding
- We get regular exposure to the investor community out there, which, on our experience, is more lively and creative than the one over here (with exceptions, obviously…)
- The network of like-minded people we’ll make will be invaluable for cross-pollinating ideas, and help us develop this and any other future ideas we decide to pursue
At the moment, we’re at the stage where we have a vaguely functioning proof of the idea we pitched to the investors, which is a great start considering we really started part-time work about 4 weeks ago! What we are going to be doing in San Francisco to start with is get as much feedback as possible on what we have created, and what we plan to create, then once we’re sure what direction we want to go in, put our heads down and work as hard as we can manage for 10 weeks.
The culmination of the programme is a “demonstration day” where all the teams involved do a show and tell in front of investors and corporate development people from all the interesting tech companies in the bay area. Needless to say, we need to get that right!
