Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

Earlier this month I caught up with 115 MBA students from the MIT Sloan School of Management, over here for tours of Silicon Valley's top companies and venture capital firms.

The evening event was held at the top of the Bank of America building in San Francisco, a stunning, lofty location with sweeping and glittering vistas. A fitting metaphor for the potential promise of a job and striking it rich in Silicon Valley.

The room was filled with several hundred students and alumni and the mood was high energy. Paul Denning, head of media relations at MIT Sloan said the students had a great week, visiting top companies such as Google, and also top VC firms such as Venrock and Hummer Winblad.

Everywhere they went, the reception was great, and the economy in Silicon Valley is much more energetic than in previous years, said Ayo Aloran, one of the TAs. Everyone seems to be hiring, which is good news since the MBA program costs about $140k to complete.

About 65 of the students at the event are enrolled in the MIT Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program, co-founded by Edward Roberts, who serves as chair. Mr Roberts, also, was very happy with the week's visits.

"The diversity of people here is incredible. At one startup all six founders were from different countries. I asked them if this was a key to their success. They said they hadn't thought about it but it probably did help," said Mr Roberts.

I mentioned that most of our entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley don't enroll in schools to learn about entrepreneurism but go out and just do it. Many of the most succesful tech entrepreneurs are university drop outs, such as Bill Gates, and the 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of FaceBook. [See Fast Company: Hacker. Dropout. CEO. - Mark Zuckerberg]

I asked Mr Roberts if his entrepreneurship students were ready to start companies. He said only a couple, most want to get experience inside companies first and then ten years later start a company.

I couldn't stay long and had to leave the enthusiastic crowd in mid-buzz. I shared the elevator down with an MIT alumni from 2002 now working at a large VC firm. I asked him if his firm might hire some of the MBA students. "I don't think so."

- - -

Here is student blogger Inaki Berenguer's account of the Silicon Valley trip:

It has been one of the most inspiring experiences I have had about entrepreneurship.

We were located in Stanford Park Hotel, next to Stanford University and Sand Hill Road. We have visited startups such as Meraki, Plusmo, Intelleflex, Adify, Mywaves.com, Mobi.tv, Nebuad, Aeroscout, or Telenav, meeting with their founding teams. We have also had receptions at more established (but leading) companies such as Salesforce.com, VMWare or Google. We have also met partners of VCs such as Venrock, Morgenthaler or Menlo Ventures.

Inaki Berenguer, MBA '09: Back from the Silicon Valley Trek

Technorati Tags: MITSloan

Jason Throckmorton wrote:

Do you know any good candidates looking for technology PR positions in New York?

LaunchSquad, a growth-stage technology and new media PR firm is growing its New York office and looking for smart, creative PR professionals to join the team. We are currently looking for strong Account Executives and Account Managers.

Mention Silicon Valley Watcher.

Ross Mayfield, founder and CEO of SocialText, an online wiki/applications site is looking for a CEO to grow the company to the next stage.

Ross is extremely well connected and is one of the more interesting people in SIlicon Valley. Take a look at his current management team, board, and advisors:

Management Team

• Ross Mayfield
• Peter Kaminski
• Adina Levin
• Kris Duggan
• Matthew Mahoney
• Paul Wescott
• Dan Bricklin

Board of Directors

• Tim Draper
• Joi Ito
• Jimmy Wales
• Ross Mayfield

Board of Advisors

• Tom Gruber
• Zack Lynch
• Jerry Michalski
• Mitch Ratcliffe
• Doc Searls
• Clay Shirky
• David Weinberger
• Kevin Werbach

Here is a description:

Company: Socialtext
Job Title: CEO
Description: As a company founder, as I've written before, it is inevitable and necessary that your role evolves for the best interest of the company and what you own of it. Today I'm invoking the most powerful inflection point I can for Socialtext. We've grown to 3,000 customers, 50 people, the leading brand in the space, an innovative product, solid revenue growth and are targeting profitability. It is time for Socialtext to be taken to the next level, and for that, I want to openly recruit the CEO 2.0 for Socialtext.

The ability to do this search openly is part of the great culture we have built at Socialtext. I'm going to transition to Chairman & President and focus on growing the top line with my external facing duties and drive corporate and product strategy. CEO 2.0 will bring a strong operations background and have a mandate to grow the bottom line. This is a dream job.

The ideal candidate will have prior CEO experience, an Enterprise Software background, Social Software expertise, proven operations management capabilities including managing remote teams and a strong personal reputation.

I'm just starting the search and you can help. We should be able to find the right person within our own strong network, so if you can make a strong recommendation please contact me through LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Jobs
• View job listing on LinkedIn
• Forward this job
• Reply to Ross Mayfield

Job Listing: http://www.linkedin.com/e/vjb/335302/

I recently met with PayScale, the Seattle-based aggregator of salary information. The company says that it can provide users with an accurate, assessment of salaries for specific jobs in regions around the world.

That sounds like a chance for snooping on colleagues and bosses, and thus wonderfully enticing. But Joe Giordano, the founder and VP of product development, and Mike Metzger, the CEO said that they protect people's privacy so it is difficult to check a specific person's salary although you can probably get a good approximation.

Here is some fresh jobs data on Silicon Valley salaries (not including bonuses). You can view the rest of the spreadsheet here.

The power of the site is in the real-time salary survey data that users put into the system. And that is done by following a set of questions that tie salary to education, location, experience and type of job.

But how does PayScale ensure the quality of its data? "By following the line of questions we can eliminate false salary data, because we already know how much someone would be making. And there is not much incentive for people to lie because they want accurate information themselves," explained Mr Giordano.

Mr Metzger said that there are 20 tests that are designed to check for validity. Any data that falls out of the statistical norm is rejected. As much as 50 percent of profiles are rejected by the system.

Individuals can use the service for free in exchange for filling out a salary survey. The money is made on services sold to human resource departments in large companies. And that's the future for the company, rolling out business services based on its data while allowing individuals free access to the data to evaluate job offers.

With more than one million users, PayScale claims it has the most accurate salary database of anyone, including government statistics. "Government data takes months to collect and publish and it is very broad. For example, Our data can distinguish a nurse's salary according to the size of the hospital, its location, and several other factors," said Mr Giordano.

The company was just awarded a top ten HR product of the year by Human Resource Executive magazine, so it must be heading in the right business direction.

SVW's take: PayScale's database could provide it with some additional opportunities to partner with other online services such as job boards. And it could become a place where individuals could return time and again for personalised career planning, advice, career development and jobs wanted.

The company has raised VC money and is building out its infrastructure. The challenge will be in making sure the quality of its data is fresh and relevant. That means it has to have a large number of profiles spanning many regions. HR departments are reticent about sharing their data because of potential lawsuit problems so attracting individuals to volunteer their information, and to do it on a regular basis, is key.

Company overview: http://www.payscale.com/about.asp?pg=about&sub=overview
Managment bios: http://www.payscale.com/about.asp?pg=mgmt&sub=exec
HR Exec press release: http://payscale.com/about.asp?pg=news&sub=pr&pr=101

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The first 20 job postings are free!

Silicon Valley draws in the smartest people from around the world and that's what makes living and working here so compelling. It is the quality of the conversations here, the engagement with so many different people, which helps create innovation.

While there is no shortage of great ideas, what we do have is a shortage of great teams. SVW has partnered with JobThread to offer a jobs board and help our readers build great teams.

We'll also be writing about the jobs market, what skills are in demand, and trends in the marketplace. If you need a database administrator (very hot right now) or a marcoms/pr specialist with at least 8 years experience (also v. hot) we hope that the Silicon Valley Watcher Jobs board will become a great resource to build your dream teams.

To get things started the first 25 postings are free!

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