For entrepreneurship, it seems all roads lead to Silicon Valley. These roads can begin at Oxford University, where a 23-year-old Bob Goodson--future chief executive at YouNoodle, an angel-funded company that tracks start-up ventures and works with Global Entrepreneurship Week--heard a speech and decided to drop out and make the move to California.

Or, there's Vikas Gupta of Chandigarh, India, who first worked for Amazon.com and later founded Jambool, a company that facilitates online payments for social networks.

But while opportunities for entrepreneurs abound in Silicon Valley, particularly for foreign-born entrepreneurs, there are also a number of challenges--visa rules and technical problems of cross-border business practices.

The Financial Times talks to several entrepreneurs who are calling Silicon Valley home, and how they got there.

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