SVCO 12: What does it take to start, scale and run a great Big Data technology company?

Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 2012 (SVCO 12) is an iconic entrepreneurship event now in its 12th year, that brings the most relevant technology entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to Oxford, UK to engage with University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School students plus members of the wider Oxford entrepreneurial ecosystem. SQLstream CEO Damian Black is hosting and presenting sessions on both aspects – the trials and tribulations of getting a tech Big Data startup off the ground in Silicon Valley, plus insight into the current state and future potential of the Big Data market. There’s also the debate at the University of Oxford Student Union where Damian will be leading one side of the debate, but more on that in a separate blog.  Other speakers include senior representatives from Google, IBM and McKinsey. Click here for the full list of speakers.

What they don’t teach you in Business School on how to create and build a start-up company.

Damian’s workshop on tech startups focuses on a real-world perspective that is often overlooked in Business Schools. Most are aware of the importance of developing the right ideas, the right business plans, on building the right team and attracting the right capital. These are of course all useful steps but the reality is often very different.

Damian is leading a workshop that will cover the lessons and scars learnt during the early days of SQLstream and other start-ups, giving a real-world perspective as to what was easy, what was hard, what worked, what didn’t, and at the unanticipated pitfalls and the unexpected boosts that together made up the start-up journey of taking a company from crazy concept to everyday reality.

The full material and paper from the workshop will be published here on the blog over the coming weeks.

Also coming up in the next few weeks, The “Big Data” Janus Effect (and why is everyone might be looking the wrong way). Damian’s talk on Big Data at SVCO 12 will look at the intersection of Big Data and real-time, and whether the current emerging Big Data storage technologies are the beginning of a new era, or the final death throes of the static storage approach to business and operational intelligence that has persisted since the 70s.

Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford is on the 18th and 19th of November at the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.