Listen to In at the Start (12/08/2010)

I keep coming back to Silicon Valley California because is it such an instructive place to think about how business are created ... and maybe thrive.

For decades now a stream of startup companies have grown big and influential in the Valley, built around the silicon chip and the new economy created by computing.

Clustered round all the skills a startup business needs, the backers, advisors, lawyers, and venture capitalists, the little towns that make up most of the Valley are a magnet for the brightest minds from all over the world, drawn by instinct to a place where things happen.

Fascinating, therefore, to stumble on a building which is a microcosm of Silicon Valley as a whole.

It's run by Saeed Amidi, whose family fled from the Iranian revolution in the 1970s. He went to business college in the Valley, and was shocked when his father suggested that he should start working for a living.

The family had opened a Persian rug shop in the main street in the rich little city of Palo Alto, just down the road from Stanford University and the vast concentration of wealth controlled by the venture capitalists in Sand Hill Road.

The shop Medallion Rugs is still there; it's a good place to run into startup business people who have just made a fortune by floating their new companies and need floor coverings for the new house which is one of the things that newly wealthy people buy.

Saeed Amidi got on with starting his own businesses: real estate, investment, and a water bottling company.

Mice

Eventually he bought the nondescript premises further up the street that he was running his operations from: 165 University Avenue.

When I first saw it – something like 10 years ago – it still had a sticker on the front from a recent tenant: Google.

Before Google, it was the offices of the global computer peripheral specialists Logitech, originally from Switzerland, and famous still for their mice.

Successful startups don't stay very long at 165 University Avenue; the premises (laid out round a upper floor courtyard) are fine when you have only 20 employees, but get crowded if you grow to 60, which is what new business tend to do, fast.

After Google moved out came the internet payments company PayPal, and the mobile phone business Danger; both made their founders and backers totals of hundreds of millions a few years after they moved on from 165 University Avenue by selling themselves to bigger companies.

And the savvy landlord Saeed Amidi insisted on taking a small stake in PayPal along with the rent.

And now, with a record of canny investments behind, him, he is trying to capture what he calls the lucky kharma of 165 University Avenue in larger premises a few miles away.

Dozens of high tech start-ups run by dazzling young would be entrepreneurs from many parts of the world can rent cubicle space by the month at what he calls a Plug and Play Centre ... it's ready to start from day one.

Flexible

Tenants like the intensity of being together with like-minded entrepreneurs. Plug and Play hosts a constant series of events which bring in prospective inventors who are always on the prowl for the next big thing in the Valley.

There are links with universities and executive mentors who can give advice and guidance to the new companies.

Its aim is to be the essence of Silicon Valley concentrated into several floors of tiny office space ... flexible so that as your business grows you can take over more of the cubicles these high tech businesses seem to thrive in.

The business ideas are striking at Plug and Play, but it remains to be seen whether it too can become a lucky building for entrepreneurs on the remarkable lines of 165 University Avenue.

Meanwhile Saeed Amidi is prowling the globe, seeking to set up more of these intense business incubators or accelerators in places such as Vancouver and Singapore, hoping that the luck of 165 University Avenue can rub off on other places far from Silicon Valley.

When it comes to staring a business, you can't neglect the influence of luck.

Listen to In at the Start (12/08/2010)