Since the departure of the “traitorous eight” from Fairchild in 1957, which led to the creation of Intel and AMD and countless other companies in the area, the Silicon Valley has always been the epicenter of innovation in technology. Each visit to the Valley is a powerful reminder that the momentum hasn’t been lost and the concentration of talent (compounded by the proximity of Berkeley and Stanford) is quite amazing.

During our last visit, we spent a couple of weeks in San Francisco, Palo Alto and San Jose to catch up with friends, colleagues, entrepreneurs, investors and VCs. They always have interesting insights about what is hot and what is not so hot in the Valley…

• Hot sectors attracting funding and interest at the moment:
  • Mobile payments;
  • Personalised health;
  • Big Data (consumer data, health);
  • 3D printing;
  • SaaS & Cloud models becoming pervasive;
  • Haptic feedback (tactile screens, etc.)

• Some pain points and issues for growing companies:
  • Attracting and retaining top talent in the Bay area is getting tougher as competition for the best is fierce (Facebook and Google seem in frontal competition for top developers and we heard stories of crazy salaries being paid);
  • Alignment of incentives for senior executives is still an issue with some leaving as soon as the stock options grants kick-in and others filtering bad news until after main vesting dates;
  • US Visa restrictions are still preventing flexible flows of international talent… we even heard that an incubator was planning to set itself up on a boat, outside of San Francisco, so that the participants wouldn’t need full US Visas.

In the Valley even the local olive oil is produced using innovative production techniques to give it a lovely smokey flavour!