Tech network targets start-ups

Investor Saeed Amidi has a particular interest in encouraging entrepreneurs from outside the US to come to Silicon Valley, writes Karlin Lillington

WHEN SILICON Valley resident Saeed Amidi goes to watch his children play soccer, the conversation among the parents on the sidelines generally turns to technology. A large number of the parents are venture capitalists, he says. “They’re asking, ‘what did you invest in this week? What did you exit out of?’”

Given that environment, perhaps it was inevitable that the Iranian immigrant and Stanford and Harvard University graduate found himself gravitating into technology investments. Though he started out – and continues – in the bottled water business, he finds himself in the thick of the venture capital community thanks to the purchase of a building in Palo Alto that eventually became the first home to PayPal.

Luckily, he got shares as part of his leasing deal, which have since helped fund the expansion of his business.

Now Amidi has three sites in the Valley – Palo Alto, Redwood City and Sunnyvale – that he lets to technology start-ups as part of what he calls the Plug and Play Tech Center – www.plugandplaytechcenter.com

Amidi, who takes shares as part of the leasing agreements, has tried to build a community of start-ups with access to top-level funding.

This week, he was in Ireland speaking about the centre and the current Valley funding climate to an audience at NovaUCD, the university’s technology transfer innovation centre.

Amidi has one Irish company in the centre, NovaUCD-based motion sensor company BiancaMed, co-founded by its chief scientific officer Prof Conor Henaghan, who came along to Amidi’s talk.

As an immigrant, Amidi says he has a particular interest in encouraging more technology entrepreneurs from outside the US to come to the Valley.

His own story illustrates the ingredients he says any start-up needs to succeed: “passion, belief and drive”.

Part of the wave of immigrants that left Iran after the ousting of the Shah in 1979, he had to scramble to create a new income in his adopted country. His plastic bottle business was doing comfortably well when he got the opportunity to buy the building he was renting.

The building was Phillips’ old research and development building and was about to be torn down, he says.

“That’s where my journey began in occupying 80 per cent of my time in the technology business,” he laughs.

Initially, the plan was simply to let space to tech company start-ups but, before long, Amidi wanted to add community and networking elements, and the centre was born. A little over two years later, the centre, which is 100 per cent privately run, is now home to 220 start-up companies and Amidi says some $700 million has been raised by resident companies.

He hasn’t lowered his ambitions: “I’m aiming for a community of 1,000 start-ups by 2010.”

Amidi has worked to build a network of funding relationships that range from a few Google millionaires, other high-profile Valley angel investors like Ron Conway, smaller angel firms, and leading Valley venture capital companies like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Sequoia Capital.

Investors are involved in regular monthly visits to the centre to meet young companies, Amidi says. Keeping that funding roster fresh and active is important, as is trying to come up with different ways they might be interested in investing, especially in an economic downturn.

“I’ve started a campaign to meet 100 VCs, and I’m on 60-plus,” he says. “I try to get them to do 10 angel investments. I’ve been able to convince some to do a subgroup of their partners to smaller investments,” which he thinks will be a help, given the climate heading into 2009.

Amidi also spends four hours a month with well-known Valley VC Tim Draper, “looking at five start-ups [in the centre], and on average, we invest in one,” he says.

He notes that he doesn’t like to be a lone angel investor and likes to partner, with the average round being worth about $800,000, made up of a number of smaller $100,000 to $200,000 investments from individual angels.

In addition, the centre hosts talks by senior technology figures. “Im always surprised that these people come to speak to just 100 or 200 people, but they love to give something back,” he says. It also hosts themed events, such as a recent “Mobile Beat’ gathering that brought in hopeful start-ups in the mobile communications area to meet representatives from Nokia, Samsung, some people from Google’s Android mobile platform group and a number of the networks.

“We feel events are really the catalyst for getting stuff done,” he says.

Amidi also does an annual “tech trek” to talk to start-ups at Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Cornell University. Many of the companies are student-founded and often he finds that he and other VCs are making investments into companies so young they have not been incorporated.

Though such young and inexperienced companies bring their own management headaches, Amidi loves them. “For every headache, you have so much energy, so much passion.”

Amidi says any company serious about looking for funding increases that possibility by being based directly in Silicon Valley, with access to the area’s huge network of investors.

He has 25 international start-ups in the centre at the moment and says he would like to bump that up to 60 by the end of 2009. “So I would love to have one or two more from Ireland,” he says.