As the year draws to a close, it’s time for the usual checks and balances.

While Mind the Bridge’s activity spreads wide and deep with support to corporations, startups and scaleups around the world, here’s a little deep dive of what happened at our Startup School in San Francisco.

To celebrate some of the highlights of what happened, we have created a pretty awesome infographic (see below).

STARTUP-SCHOOL-MTB-Infographic-8

The program of the School started officially back in 2007. Remember that?

Steve Jobs is about to launch the first iphone, Hillary Clinton is the First Lady, Gordon Brown becomes PM in UK, France gets Sarkozy, Barry Bond is at his peak with his career with the SF Giants, Stephen Curry is still playing college basketball for Davidson Wildcats, and EU Union is still growing his membership. Most importantly: nobody talks about startups, in particular outside of Silicon Valley (YCombinator was recently born, and still mostly unknown to the masses).

That’s exactly the time we thought supporting the most promising startups from Italy (at the time) to learn from Silicon Valley could be a worthy endeavour.

So, here it comes, with 9 years under our belt: Startup is the national sport for most of the world countries, hundreds of accelerator programs, infinite startup incubators.

And we are still true to ourselves. With a clear international feel (20 countries represented and growing) and focus on a few selected participants (10-15) at the time.

The following is a just a recap of what happened in the last 4 years, with some noticeable highlights.

While some of the startups we supported were more mature than others (in particular some coming through partners such as  the Welcome Project funded by the European Commission) the spirit of the school remains intact: getting an intense boost of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, using the Silicon Valley as the natural sounding board … And live a life changing experience (without breaking the bank).