Menlo Park Renaissance (Part 4)

If we can bring together the Silicon Valley–style entrepreneurship, with taste, style, culture, food, wine, and art in a well-thought-through city center, Menlo Park can indeed become that eclectic creative cauldron so rare and elusive. Housing this creativity should be a series of great public spaces, terraces, patios, plazas and boulevards.

Menlo Park Renaissance (Part 3)

Parts of Silicon Valley are extremely beautiful. My favorite is Woodside. However, other parts of Silicon Valley are plain vanilla. San Jose, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Carlos, and Redwood City – these towns have no style and not much to offer in terms of aesthetics. Silicon Valley has never really paid attention to style or

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Menlo Park Renaissance (Part 2)

Perhaps of all the American states, California, because of its wine country, has placed the most emphasis on cultivating a food and wine culture. Among our natural advantages, we count great local produce and local wine. In fact, Napa Valley has become one of the country’s greatest tourist destinations.

Menlo Park Renaissance (Part 1)

When I first wrote the piece Silicon Valley: The Next Decade, I did not think that an opportunity to implement the ideas expressed in it would come so soon. Even as I wrote the follow-on piece, The Next European Renaissance, I had not yet started the subsequent discussions with the Menlo Park City Council. However,

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Silicon Valley: The Next Decade (Part 3)

The Money and How It Is Applied Of course, the models discussed are predicated upon the fact that the patrons and salonniers had money and were willing to spend it on fostering a community of artists and intellectuals without directly benefiting from such an “investment.”

Silicon Valley: The Next Decade (Part 2)

How Do You Foster Renaissance Thinking? Each period of renaissance from history saw great congregations of talented people from multiple disciplines in certain cities or regions. Two prominent examples are Florence under the Medicis and Elizabethan England. Artists, writers, scientists, and philosophers were in the same place, working close to each other and exchanging ideas

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Outsourcing: Dr. Shami Khorana of HCL America (Part 4)

By guest author Tony Scott Tony: Do you see HCL also doing more of the type of deals that you did with CA, possibly moving into product creation? Shami: Definitely. There was a time when we were very strong and focused on seeing whether we could do an entire platform; everything is about platforms. One

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Seed Capital From Angel Investors: Geoff Ralston, Silicon Valley (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold Geoff: Sometimes I’ll say to entrepreneurs, “You have a decent idea but your pitch sucks. You’ve got to learn how to take your idea and sell it. If you’re going to go through PowerPoints about X, Y, and Z, this isn’t why I invest. This isn’t how

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