Fast-forward two years when Stefano knew I was back in the Valley, he shot me a mail — “Cookpad acquires Allthecooks”. I replied, “Can you intro me to the founder?” Two weeks and an espresso later at Café Venetia, Palo Alto, Rafa introed me to the founder of Cookpad.

My first meeting with the Cookpad founder was scheduled for 30–45 minutes. But that day we spent twelve hours talking. The next week we spent six hours at a stretch. This was followed by visits by Corp. Dev. Five months later, we signed the acquisition deed.

Twenty six months ago, on a rainy day in Bangalore, I told my team I have to move to the Valley. There is no point staying back here, I said. So many questions — leadership, new hires, product, design, electricity bills – and yet, I seemingly orphaned them without answers for what might seem like an escape. In fact, the team was less of a problem than my family. My wife would essentially have to reset her senior engineering position at a telecom company for the relocation.

And yet, like Frank Underwood, I took her to San Jose two months later.

I knew. I knew the random sequence of serendipitous events that led to this eight-person startup being acquired by a Japanese behemoth was only possible in the Valley. I knew that a geeky biker investor introducing me to a competitor who eventually spent hours with me and then connected me to the acquirer is only possible in the Valley. If experience was any indication, Cucumbertown’s seed funding was my teacher. I had no doubts about a positive outcome. I just knew I had to be here.

The Valley is where the essence of a person’s attitude dramatically changes to positive exuberance. Like love, the Valley has an effect on you where words fail.

To understand the serendipity of the Valley you need to get to the people. The Geeks. You need to understand what motivates them.

The Valley is a place where founders spend humungous amounts of time helping strangers start-up. A legion of nouveau riche entrepreneurs turned “mentors” and an amazing crowd that adapts to new technology like a duck to water (if there’s one reason you should be in the axis mundi, it’s for the initial audience that’s up for almost anything). The Valley is also the technology megaphone for the world. Barring exceptions, anything the valley adopts has a sexy effect. The only place in the world where you’ll see more Dropbox t-shirts than taxis. It’s a desert for those who don’t know anyone and a monsoon for the networked. A place where meritocracy has a shot vs. street smarts and monopolizing darwinism.

I tried to figure out why this happens and the closest I could rationale was the precedent set by a few good men on a blank canvas that was once orange orchards.

You can always argue that these things are possible in another part of the world. But you won’t get this package anywhere else, with a side of artisan bread and good weather.

Oh and, by the way, all of our corp dev meetings were at the Palo Alto, Alameda Starbucks. We also had pho at Castro Street, Mountain View. I thought we would have a Richard Gere in Arbitrage style sign off ceremony. Instead it came via an email through HelloSign, while I was sleeping. So very un-Hollywood. And so very Valley.

Here’s to the Valley.

I assumed this was probably due to some shutdown corruption (though I rarely hit those in OS X). It just wouldn’t come back up and showed me some font error

And for the first time in a very very long time I logged into the web console.
You see, I use Evernote as a note app to just backup. I sleep in the comfort that my notes are somewhere safe in the “cloud”.

But lo and behold, the web version didn’t show that one note that mattered to me.
If I didn’t tell you already, here’s my life’s story. I have only one Evernote note that matters. Everything is in that note. Like the college hostel room. It has my notes, flight ticket numbers, emails, project plan, reviews links and just about everything. I have some more notes, but they don’t matter in comparison.

Paranoia kicked in. I opened up the IOS app. I didn’t find it there either.

God!

Rushed out a support ticket. No response in a day. Tweeted to the Evernote app. Someone picks it up.

The support agent runs me through the standard procedure. Restart, check trash, latest web app? etc. A couple of exchanges later, I reluctantly install a new version, fearing a total overwrite.

And there it is, my life-saving “TODO” in the desktop version.

But then I wondered. Why wasn’t “TODO” backed up?

The standard mail exchange happens. Clear web cache, restart browser, etc. Then I resorted to checking the IOS app.

Since you can’t ask the customer to clear the iPhone app cache, I was asked to login and logout.

Exchange goes on and on. The representative asks me for the activity logs.

And then comes then solution!

and the graceful close of the ticket

I don’t know what happened to that note or why it wasn’t uploaded, but I doubt I’m going to sit around comfortably believing everything “is safely backed up”.

What if DropBox did this to you?

Can someone build a simple cloud backed up notes app that “works”? I’ll pay you $5 per month.

My yearly travel to the tech industry’s cradle teaches and helps me more than any other education. This year was no different.
Here are the learnings:

• People are using Pinterest to search.
  This was a revelation. Search for party planning ideas and you get much more qualitative results than Google. I was stumped by the real use of Pinterest.
• Sharing economy is booming. Airbnb, SupperShare, Vayable etc.
• There is hope on the streets. The cogs of the American economy seem like moving.
• There are a lot of businesses that are built to scale but do not have a revenue model. And that’s fine. The rationale is value add to the eco-system and consequently an acquisition.
  

  2/The key: Value of a tech company to public or private markets may be completely unrelated to value of same co to a corporate acquirer.

  — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) April 17, 2014

• Hyper-local companies are ruling the roost.
• There is a lot of focus on transaction business involving real movement of goods combined with Internet convenience play.
• San Francisco is as beautiful as ever. The city is managing to retain its charm and stay unpolluted (in large parts of the city). Sadly not many people living there realize this. It takes an outsider’s perspective to appreciate it.
• Ironically there is a lot of hatred among the locals about “tech” but I was honestly surprised since the west coast is largely transient population.
• Palo Alto, Mountain View etc. are no more part of Silicon Valley. SF is the happening city. Cent percent of my meetings were in SF. The last time I was here its was distributed between University Ave, PA, Castro Mountain View and SF.
• A lot of people are homeless. Every year I visit it’s increasing. Maybe I am using the wrong streets. I am surprised there’s no startup to fix this. Maybe this is not a 10x profitable business for funding. But the increasing divide in between the rich and the poor and the nouveau riche will only hurt in long term. History has taught us that. I hope my American friends will learn this for the larger good.
• A lot of socially driven business is just pure BS.
• Quite a few companies are built by people who have no passion for that business. They are in the axis mundi to strike gold. It makes me sad.
• This future is “only” mobile. I thought it is mobile.

Credits: OpenCulture

This was one notion I was reluctant to believe. I almost didn’t want to. It made the world unfair.

But it is.

Then I read Max Levchin’s interview. This post even generated some jealous remarks on Hacker News. In many ways it seems unfair that Max and Theil got access to the best engineers and MBA’s to build great companies. But the truth as I’ve learned is, this unfairness increased theirs odds of winning by magnitudes. Palantir, Microsoft, Google and a ton more are examples of such success. When I left Zynga to start Cucumbertown little did I realize this was implicit until I saw other startups struggle. I had access to the best product managers, recruiters, advisors and co-founders of startups from the network. Cucumbertown even got some of them as investors.

What this taught me is to build your network. One way or the other. If you didn’t get the chance to go to a great university, go get a network value job. If weren’t able to do that, write a blog, publish, talk, create something and build respect. This gets you into circles. These days most investors don’t even talk to people outside their network. This is not easy. This world is not fair. You and I, we’ve got to work against the odds.

Every bit of access into networks directed towards your goals is breeding more chances for you to succeed. There are of course exceptions.

Great read: How much is your success dependent on those around you?