Guy Kawasaki tours GSV (Global Silicon Valley) Labs, a roughly 100,000 sq. ft. incubator in Redwood City, CA. He walks through multiple floors showing shared company spaces (Fit3D, AV, Token, Tele Labs), a conference/trade-show area where startups demo products (example: Haiku shopping button), common facilities (kitchen, demo rooms, admin), and his own small office. Kawasaki emphasizes flexibility of incubator space for startups, notes the focus on educational software companies, and contrasts GSV with larger tech campuses that offer perks like free food and recreation.
Chapters
Hi, this is Guy Kawasaki and I'm inside a incubator in Silicon Valley, Redwood City, California. Exactly. To show you what a Silicon Valley incubator really looks like, this facility is GSV or Global Silicon Valley. And I'll give you a quick walk, quick walkthrough. This, for example, is the slide that you can go from one floor down to the other floor. I'm not going to take you down that slide because I might get stuck. This is a spiral staircase to the top of the roof. I've never been on that either, to tell you the truth. So here, let me show you what facilities look like. So this is about a hundred thousand square feet. And every, every little area like this is a company. So this is a company called Fit3D. And this is a company called AV. They make this very cool headphone here and company called Token. And if you go around the corner, there's just company after company all in shared space. This is one particularly large company here. So this is Tele Labs. Okay, so now we happen to be doing this on a day when I wish I had a gimbal with me. The video would be a lot smoother. But I forgot my gimbal at home. What can I say? So actually, I didn't plan to do this. So it happens that there's a conference here today. So I'll walk you through the Silicon Valley Forum conference. So here we go.
Have a typical. Okay, so Haiku was actually created to solve a consumer problem. That problem, if anyone's ever gone to the grocery store and you get back and you realize you forgot something, what we like to call the oh, crap moment. We created Haiku to fix that. So Haiku is a shopping button. It lives in your kitchen and back into your fridge. You can press the single button on this device and you can scan barcodes, you can talk to it.
So I think those are companies pitching their products to that audience. This is a little trade show area. Okay, so this is the top floor. I'll take you now to show you the second floor, or actually the first floor. We're on the second floor, so we could go down the slide. But again, I don't want to get stuck because I'm sure that viral video would go viral if I got stuck in the slide. Okay, so here we have more of the same. So these are all individual companies. The beauty of an incubator is, you know, you may start with two employees and want to grow to 10. And if you signed a lease for a building, you'd be stuck In a small space. On the other hand, if you start with two people and think you're gonna go to 10, and you don't. You don't want to be stuck with a space that's too big either. So all of these are companies, mostly educational software companies. So we'll walk through here. Now, this incubator doesn't happen to have all the Google excesses, such as sand volleyball and sushi chef and all that kind of crap. So this is kind of a, you know, serious accelerator. Here's the kitchen. No free food. There's the slide. There's always people shucking and driving. Basically, every entrepreneur is telling you, telling the other person that, conservatively speaking, will be doing $500 million in the first year, which is total bullshit. But that's what everybody says, because they have a proven team with a proven market, with a proven technology. This is kind of the largest room where you can have demos, private conference rooms, And then more companies. Over here, this is kind of the admin department. So all these people run GSV Labs. So the last stop, I'll show you my office. So I have to go out here, this reception area for people coming into the conference. When you go out here, through this door. And. Into this door. And this is my Japanese woodblock painting. And this is the Kappa headquarters. So this is my little office here. So, as you can see, I haven't moved in too much, but this is where I work when I'm at GSV Labs. So anyway, a very quick tour of GSV Labs. I hope you enjoy, and someday, maybe you'll be in a fun little incubator like this, too. Take care. Bye. Bye.
