Letters from Silicon Valley - Week 2: The best of British

Apart from my duties at Heyzap, the last week has been taken up shadowing the top 20 U.K Cleantech entrepreneurs around the Valley.

UKTI, with the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and Polecat, was running its annual mission that takes the fastest growing businesses from a specific sector out to Silicon Valley for a week of wining and dining. This year it was the turn of the Cleantech sector.

Apart from forcing down fantastic food and drink at the evening celebrations (one such event took place at Michael Birch's house, founder of the social networking site bebo.com) it was a truly fantastic week.

I got the opportunity to meet an enlightening group of entrepreneurs who were truly on top of their game, developing and researching a broad range of products from Axial Flux Motors (Evo Electric), and it's not the same device used in the Back to the Future movie as I asked, to home energy monitors (DIY Kyoto). However, as always, things have to be put into perspective, these represent the top entrepreneurs, not the average!

A tip of the cap really has to be given to UKTI, the TSB and Polecat. It takes a lot for an organisation, especially in the U.K, to realise they aren't the best at something, in this case entrepreneurship and venture funding, and then act on it. UKTI did just this....how refreshing.

However, remembering back to my previous post that discussed the prospect of the U.K's best entrepreneurs moving out to Silicon Valley, especially with the possibility of the start-up visa. There was no answer from the TSB to the question I posed about talent drain. After all, there must be a fairly strong reason that one of the shining lights of U.K entrepreneurship, Michael Birch, now lives in San Francisco!