Road trip!
5th of April 2025
I’ve always loved a cross-country trip. I moved 1,000 miles upcountry for my first job, and the drive home for Christmas that year is still a fond memory for me: long empty roads, a humbling sense of scale, and snacks, drinks, and a pile of CDs at the ready. Bliss. Unfortunately, while I’ve had the pleasure of travelling all over the world since, it’s always been for work or with my family, and neither of those masters would put up with me taking whole days to get somewhere a flight could get me in mere hours. So when Christo first raised the idea of us going to the Forest Innovation Summit in Berkeley, I knew what I had to do: get myself onto a train and enjoy the vast, slow passage of countryside.
But while solitude is a luxury for me, Christo can’t walk through a revolving door without making new friends - a story for another post - and so he saw a more social alternative, and a train ride from Chicago to San Francisco with nary a soul in sight, became a marathon drive, got put through a sensibility filter, became the Austin-Boulder-Reno-Bay Area trip we now have start in just ten days.
Austin (16 to 19 April) - we'‘ll be chatting about pitch decks, fintechs, startup communities, and startup accelerators
Boulder (20 to 22 April) - we’ve got more venture building and investing, and a big dose of drones, drones and other fun tech
Reno (23 to 24 April) - it’s drones, drones, drones, and a bit of innovation desisn
Bay Area (25 to 30 April) - there’s so much to do here, and we’re trying to pack as much of it in as possible with a look at universities for entrepreneurship and business leadership, ocean and aerial drones, strategies for startup marketing and so much networking!
Oh, yes, and two big events:
We’ll be at the Forest Innovation Summit in Berkeley, but also. because neither of us is good at resting, at the StartUpGrind Conference both of which are on the 29th and 30th April. If you are going to be at either one, or just call one of our city stops home, do reach out - we’d love to meet up, even if just for a quick drink or meal.