Study. Compete. Work.
A year inside the ecosystem: an MS in FinTech at Menlo College, varsity tennis, and the ground-level work of actually being here.
I don't talk about the Bay Area from Europe. I studied there, competed there, built a network there.
A year inside the ecosystem: an MS in FinTech at Menlo College, varsity tennis, and the ground-level work of actually being here.
01 — Why here
Being physically here mattered more than any statistic: the conversations, the introductions, the way people actually operate. But the numbers explain why it all concentrates in one place. Each figure is sourced.
of global venture dollars landed in the Bay Area in Q2 2026. One metro area, nearly half the world's venture money.
Source: PitchBook–NVCA Venture Monitor
of global AI funding in 2025, around $126B, went to Bay Area companies, on just 22% of the world's AI deals.
startup ecosystem worldwide, a rank it has held in every major global index since the rankings began.
During SF Tech Week there can be 30 to 40 events in a single evening. That's the practical meaning of density: the informal interactions that take months to engineer in Europe happen here by accident, nightly.
02 — Silicon Valley Immersion
I didn't simply visit companies. I spent time inside the ecosystem, watched how founders, investors and operators actually interact, and picked up things that are genuinely hard to understand from Europe.
In May 2026, we closed the year with the Silicon Valley Immersion. Five days, five company visits a day. Based in Menlo Park, with themed days in San Jose and San Francisco. We sat down with people at every level, from field marketing managers to chief trust officers. At Snowflake, Splunk, Microsoft, Google, Autodesk, Bloomberg, Robert Half, an investment office managing capital for sovereign funds, and more.
What stayed with us wasn't the logos. At the data companies, the invisible scale of the infrastructure everything else runs on. At Microsoft, how a corporation that size actually decides to work with a startup. At Autodesk, trust reframed as a product feature rather than a compliance box. At Bloomberg, on the waterfront, equity specialists working on exactly the latency problems my own capstone had measured.
We went in expecting PR tours. We got something closer to radical transparency. And one pattern repeated everywhere: whatever the company, the people who received us said they hired for curiosity over credentials. Pay attention to the role, not the logo. The Valley is a network of specific people, not a collection of famous buildings.
03 — Venture Series
I didn't only attend VC sessions. I learned venture by discussing companies, investors and decisions week after week, and by helping build the sessions themselves.
The Venture Series was the VC education program we ran through the Menlo Investment Club, which I co-founded. Fifteen weekly sessions across the year on how venture actually works: thesis, sourcing, diligence, valuation, portfolio support. More than 200 cumulative attendees, and guests who had built the things we were studying, founders, operators, investors.
Preparing a session teaches you more than attending ten. When you have to explain dilution or a term sheet to a room on Tuesday night, you find out very quickly what you only half understood. Teaching VC is how I actually learned it.
We also organized a summit putting students in the same room as Sand Hill Road investors, and I built the five-day immersion program above. If you want to understand venture, organizing the room where it happens is a decent shortcut.