My first month in Silicon Valley and 500 Startups

Jonas Bøgh
3 min readNov 19, 2015

Inspired by Seth Miller, the CEO of Rapchat (another awesome 500 Startups company in our batch), I wanted to take a short break from work and look back at the last 5 weeks in Mountain View, California.

To give you some context: 4 months ago, I launched Hivebeat together with my good friend Emil Rasmussen. After being accepted into 500 Startups (I will get back to that in another post), we moved to Mountain View in sunny California to be a part of their 15th batch. We’ve been here for a month and these are some of the (crazy) things we’ve learned and experienced so far:

1. People think, breathe and live startups

First day here, the 7-eleven guy asked me to pitch my startup. Every coffee shop in San Francisco is a co-working space (if they haven’t yet turned it into a hipster café with no wifi, lol). My batch mates at 500 are discussing CRM tools when we eat lunch. I love it.

2. This place is freaking expensive

We’re paying $2,900 per month for a 1-bedroom apartment. YES, two thousand nine hundred dollars for a one-bedroom apartment. Without furniture! We could get a cool penthouse apartment in the centre of Copenhagen for that kind of money. It’s insane.

3. I have never met so many helpful strangers

The other day, I reached out to the 500 Startups network to figure out if anyone had experience with hiring college students on campuses. After 45 minutes I had received 5 emails from 5 different founders who wanted to share their experiences with me. The “pay it forward” culture is real. The network of mentors and founders is unrealistically helpful and I can’t stress enough how much it helps to have access to this. The other day I had a product manager from LinkedIn go through the design for our new app. Not a thing that happens every day.

4. Everyone wants to make the world a better place… sort of

If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, you know what I mean.

I see at least one self-driving Google car every day. I get my lunch delivered to the office two times a week. I get an email when it’s there:

The other day, my Uber driver had three phones. One for Uber, one for Lyft and one for navigation: “I don’t want to switch between apps”. Mmmmm’kay.

5. It’s so hard to prioritze

We’ve been here for almost 5 weeks and time is flying. We have 3–4 talks at the office every day about everything from email marketing to A/B testing to mobile deep linking. There’s so much going on and the biggest challenge is to figure out how to prioritize between these amazing talks and grow the business at the same time. Speaking of that — let’s get back to work!

You can follow me on Twitter if you want.

I will try to post more in the coming months (like that’s gonna happen…). If you like it then you should put a ❤ on it

--

--

Jonas Bøgh

Building a much better payroll experience for companies and their employees @pentohq.