June 16th, 2009
Starting our trek with 140 characters or less
Posted by Nancy Vega
Under: Authors, Nancy, North America, Oxford Comes to Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford
Tags: Buck's, California, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Google, Innovation, MBA, Silicon Valley, Technology, Tweetdeck, Twitter, Web 2.0
There’s no better way to kick off an entrepreneurship trek than by having breakfast with Joe DiNucci at Bucks of Woodside. I first met Joe when Silicon Valley Came to Oxford (SVCO) back in November ‘08. He’s the type of guy you wish you could have on speed-dial because his wisdom, experience and hilarious anecdotal stories always hit the spot. That, combined with the fact that he’s no more than 2 degrees of separation from anyone in the Valley, arguably makes him one of the best integral coaches in all of California.
“I distinguish between having an MBA and being an MBA. Never be an MBA.” – Joe DiNucci
After breakfast, we headed to the world’s hottest startup on earth – Twitter. When we arrived at their office, we were greeted by founder Biz Stone (@Biz) and many others from the Twitter family including Oxford MBA alumni Santosh Jayaram (@santojay) who now runs Twitter’s operations. It was interesting to hear Biz explain how Twitter was born but what really caught my attention was their strong focus on value creation through its real-time search. For most entrepreneurs, I think the passion for creating value is simply part of their DNA. However, when your product is experiencing phenomenal growth rates and non-stop media coverage like Twitter, it’s morally excellent to see the entrepreneurs still incredibly focused on value creation rather than cashing in their $250M+ chips to the Google’s of the world.
When I first signed up for a Twitter account last year, I didn’t really “get it”. Fortunately a few experienced Twitter users gave me some pointers which really helped. I also downloaded a few third party Twitter apps like TweetDeck which greatly increase my usage. However, the most valuable thing I find about Twitter is not how minimalist communication tools promote creativity (although that’s cool too) but rather how Twitter’s ecosystem is actually changing lives for the better. And If Twitter turns out to be just another fad? Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Follow me on Twitter @nancyvega.
