The day after I attended the Hadoop Summit I paid a visit to Candace Denton and the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. Plug and Play, which occupies the space that once housed Phillips Semiconductor, describes itself as a community of over 300 technology startup companies in the areas of Web 2.0, mobile, digital media, software systems (SaaS), semiconductor and telecom verticals.
Candace, who heads up Business Development at Plug and Play, gave myself and and a couple of Dell compadres a tour of their Sunnyvale facilities. After the tour we sat down in the lobby and she gave a brief synopsis of Plug and Play, where they’ve come from and what they do.
Some of the ground Candace covers
- Plug and Play’s five pillars of resources
- (0:22) Funding (they have their own funding arm)
- (1:08) Facilities (over 300,000 sq ft in the Valley)
- (1:23) Corporate relationships
- (1:36) Mentorship and advisory service
- (1:41) Networking events (hold up to 120 events a year)
- (2:28) A few of the success stories that have exited Plug and Play
- (3:43) How their founder Saeed Amidi got into this business: from leasing office space to a fledgling Google, to a bottled water company to setting up their current facilities
Extra-credit reading
- Plug and Play in Businessweek: Keeping the Faith in Silicon Valley
Pau for now…
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