Alison van Diggelen is an award-winning Silicon Valley journalist and commentator. She is available for lectures, seminars and small group classes. Her favorite topics include:

Drinking the Kool Aid: entrepreneurship lessons from Silicon Valley

Greening your business

Green and clean tech opportunities in this economy

Leveraging social media tools to build your brand and business

In December 2009, Alison moderated a panel of top New Media entrepreneurs at the SDForum   Business of New Media Conference at the Microsoft Campus in Silicon Valley. The panelists included Pandora’s Tom Conrad, Zynga’s Jonathan Flesher, Philipp Schloter of Nokia Point & Find, Mike Sego of Gaia Online and Joel Toledano of Krillion.

“Your insightful questions reached multi dimensions and flew smoothly throughout the discussion. It was the best session.” Debra Brinsmead

Photo credit DJCline    

In February 2009, Alison was invited to give a series of lectures and seminars at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland

“Alison delivered excellent realistic stuff and is a great ambassador for Silicon Valley. All great Scots have to leave Scotland to achieve their best potential.” Jay, Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club

“Alison willingly let us work her to the bone as she delivered a series of 4 excellent talks and interacted with over 100 people during these teaching episodes. The first two teachings were delivered to students, and Alison had specially interviewed 3 different entrepreneurs to provide varying perspectives on the same topics such as networking or public relations. The next day she led a Masterclass on Green and Cleantech to 10 or so startup entrepreneurs from Scotland. A lively and informative discussion followed her excellent presentation as we learned about what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists were doing about greening their businesses — and investing in others.”

“That evening Alison gave a very inspiring talk on “Drinking the Kool Aid” in Silicon Valley. This was especially enlightening to people as they not only learned about what made the Silicon Valley a special place, but how they could use evangelism to better their own businesses. Excellent feedback was received from the audience that evening. ” Michael Clouser, Associate Edinburgh-Stanford Link
 

“Your visit and presentations were a well made timely reminder that failure should not be ignored or shied away from but embraced when it comes and a necessary stopover on the road to success. That we should not underestimate the importance of failure in the discovery process and that we can and should reflect that all our paths and choices should be seen as part of the process in bringing us to where we are today – it all has value.” Dr. Steve Ewing,  Senior Business Development Executive, University of Edinburgh Informatics

“I liked the structure of the talk and the way you used the narrative of success (from a student to a millionaire) which found resonance with our students and worked quite well. The new element for students was the reported accounts of entrepreneurs in your case studies. In my view, you managed to give a social or human aspect to the process of becoming an entrepreneur. You gave an anthropological account of entrepreneurship to our students which they can relate to, even if they cannot relate to the technology or field of that entrepreneur.” Aghlab Al-Attili, Informatics Ventures

 “It was definitely one of the most informative talks I have attended, especially since it covered multiple startups from the same viewpoints (this is not something I have seen in any other talk). The things you mentioned about the new PR machine (Twitter/Facebook/etc) have also prompted me to begin using my Twitter account again. I now know that I should be allocating a sizeable proportion of my time to publicity in my future ventures too!” Ali Eslami, Founder KeepMeOut