Event Report | Geeks on a Plane: 30 Silicon Valley Geeks in Asia

In June, our friends Dave MacClure (who handles the Facebook Fund, a cooperation between Facebook and FoundersFund), Christine Lu (24,000 Twitter followers can’t be wrong) and George Godula from Web2Asia (market entry and incubation of web companies in Asia) thought that bringing 30 geeks from Silicon Valley – entrepreneurs, angel investors and media web execs – would be a good idea to bridge Asian and Western tech scenes.

The 10-days tour, aptly named “Geeks On a Plane” would stop in Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai and include various events to meet with the local technologists, entrepreneurs and investors. We co-organized things in Beijing: full-day conference, start-up pitches, Great Wall hike and more.

This turned out to be a pretty intense experience, as strenuous as rewarding. Here is the talk we gave at Startonomics in Beijing on “Innovations Models in China“, including our “5C of innovation” (video, 20 min). The event was well attended by over a 100 participants with many high-profile and insightful speakers such as Google China’s CEO Kai-Fu Lee.

Here is some reporting on the tour:

Tokyo | Tokyo 2.0, Startonomics Tokyo, More Startonomics and Interview with Mixi CEO Learning from Tokyo

Beijing | Startonomics Beijing, Videos

As there is no good trip without surprises: one participant got quarantined in Beijing due to Swine Flu risk (fortunately after the Startonomics event ^_^). He reports on his hilariously mundane days in quarantine here – TechCrunch’s take on how social media can make your life better, even (or especially) in quarantine.

Other events, such as Startup2Startup Beijing, TEDxShanghai, Barcamp and more were part of the tour. More details here.

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