Diary
Another meeting set up for next week to talk about Silicon Surrey strategy with one of the highly experienced local startup advisors. Two other people have said that they think the idea is very interesting. Need to work on setting up the petition.
Jason's friend who was yesterday sceptical idea is today a lot more friendly about it, as he had time to contemplate on the power of locally driven innovation. Jason also started the process of future authoring the vision of Silicon Surrey 2035, which is an exercise that worked very well for Roli to help them become Apple partners worldwide when he worked as a consultant for them. The initial web page for future vision is now deployed, but needs more fleshing out in next few days. Another school friend of Jason's thinks the idea is great. There is also an emerging idea of creating a petition of supporters of the idea, for those who simply want to be on the supporters list. Something to further develop soon.
Jason reached out to several other contacts in Surrey and followed up with contacts from yesterday's networking event. Also had a pretty long conversation with a friend about what makes Silicon Surrey idea be appealing and what are its main challenges. Surrey offers a unique set of characteristics to it and, as such, inspires different kinds of innovation which is a lot more 'natural' to happen from Surrey than other areas.
Jason went out networking in Central London today and met two Surrey based entrepreneurs who were very interested in Silicon Surrey. One is based in Guildford and predominantly an investor and the other in Croydon and a founder of an AI based shipping optimisation company. Connections were made and follow ups will be happening soon. Jason also re-connected with his old colleague who is an HR specialist and whispered to her about Silicon Surrey. She immediately loved the idea, especially the tagline of 'Redesigning humanity from Surrey'. Jason also spoke to Anothony Rose, founder of Seed Legals and told him about Silicon Surrey. He suggested Jason get in touch with professor from Surrey University who Jason met couple of times in the past.
We continue to build our web presence and work on formalising the Silicon Surrey presentation, to enable various people to easily understand what we are working on and how they can get involved. Post New Year spirit is still on, so many are away from work. We are thinking that next week will be a good time to start reaching out to potential allies and supporters to start building momentum for Silicon Surrey in 2026.
We start 2026 as a true New Year for Silicon Surrey. Website development is in full swing at the moment. Website is serving as a guiding structure to set up the processes and workflows for onboarding various stakeholders into the project. We are slowly gearing up to lift off into a more publicly facing promotional phase. Lots to do to start getting the cogs of the system moving forward. Exciting times ahead!