All in nextNY

Thinking about going from Employee #23515 to Employee #5? nextNY MatchupCamp

Charlie O'Donnell
Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

I've been thinking a lot about where entrepreneurs and startup talent come out of in NYC. A lot of folks believe that you can train people coming out of the financial services base to do something entrepreneurial, but honestly, I'm not so sure about that. What I do think, however, is that it takes more than just a visionary leader or a ninja-level hacker to start a business. There are tons of startup companies in New York City, many already making money or well funded, that are looking for top supporting talent--engineers, designers, salespeople, business development pros, product managers, etc. This is where we, as the startup community, can do a better job--mining the installed base of talent in big companies. I'm actively looking for ideas on how to tell the masses of talented, experiences folks slaving away in Cubeworld that there's a thriving innovation community in New York City with lots of great companies looking for talent. How do we pick apart the CondeNasts, JP Morgans, and Time Inc's? Please talk to me about it. If you're a recovering Fortune 500 employee, tell me how you got out. (charlie@firstround.com) One way the nextNY community is trying to help is with Matchup Camp.

MatchupCamp is for skilled professionals to find new opportunities—for developers to find inspiring projects, for salespeople to find interesting products to sell, etc.  It’s not a bunch of unemployed people handing out resumes.  It’s for people looking to explore where they might best fit.  When we did this two years ago, technical talent probably made up 40% of the crowd and we’re working hard to make sure it’s not just people with ideas, but people who can make them happen.

When: December 8th at 6:30

Where: FYI Studio 22 West 27th, 6th Floor

RSVP here

Launching my weekly e-mail notes on the New York innovation community

Charlie O'Donnell
Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

Wow… what a long way we’ve come.  In February 2006, I started nextNY because the only community-wide event in town was the NY Tech Meetup and, at the time, it didn’t have much community about it.  I think I was member #71 and now it’s got over 10,000.  At the same time, the NY tech community has exploded with events, both educational and social.  One look at GarysGuide and you can get quickly overwhelmed.

A number of people asked me at recent nextNY events how they can find out about what’s going on.  Pointing a busy entrepreneur or executive to the nextNY listserv, which buzzes all day with discussion of memory caches, CMS’s, and finding a bookkeeper clearly isn’t the answer. 

Therefore, I’ve decided to take the attendee lists from the last two Shakeshack events and some recent nextNY talks and start a once a week e-mail newsletter as a curated version of what’s going on around town and in the online communities as well.  In the future, I’ll also be highlighting some open job positions, maybe some companies, and maybe just some recommendations on people that you should follow.  If you’d like to sign up for the list, just go here.  It’s going to look pretty texty and unformatted for a bit, but I’ll dress it up soon.

 

Event of the Week:

The Net Neutrality TechDebate, an Oxford style competitive back and forth on what is probably the most important topic in technology today that few of us have a clue about. 

The debate will be held on Tuesday, November 17th at the IAC Building, 555 W 18th St btw 10th & 11th ave.  Doors open at 7:00 PM.   **RSVP here**

The Debaters

Against

James Assey - Executive Vice President, National Cable and Telecommunications Association
Robert Quinn -  Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory, AT&T
Christopher Yoo - Professor of Law and Communication; Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, UPenn Law

For

Tim Wu - Coined the term "Network Neutrality"; Professor of Law, Columbia Law
Brad Burnham - VC, Union Square Ventures
Nicholas Economides - Professor of Economics, Stern School of
Business, New York University.

Can't make it?

The debate will be streamed live at: http://www.livestream.com/techdebate
A podcast will be available after the event at: http://tech-debate.com

 

Would rather drink? 

Check out the NYVC Happy Hour instead.

=========================================

This week is O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo at the Javits Center.  By registering for an Expo Pass, you can get in free to see all the keynotes, the sponsored sessions, Web2Open, Launch Pad, and the Birds of a Feather sessions.  

Here’s what you won’t want to miss:

Monday

Ignite NYC – 5 minutes, 20 slides.  Geeks + Slideshows = Awesomeness

7PM at New World Stages: 340 West 50th Street

 

Tuesday

2PM: A Conversation with Caterina Fake Jennifer Pahlka (Code for America), Caterina Fake (Hunch)

2:25PM: Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media danah boyd (Microsoft Research)

 

Wednesday

2:20pm A Conversation about the Realtime Web Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.), John Borthwick (betaworks)

 

Thursday

9:15am A Conversation with Beth Noveck Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.), Beth Noveck (Executive Office of the President/OSTP)  <—Yes, *the* President

=========================================

 

It’s also Entrepreneur Week and there are a couple of noteworthy panels.  Unfortunately the event is sold out, but there will be a livestream available on their site soon.

I think the pick of the conference is this panel at 2:15PM on Thursday:

The Revenue Inflection Point: The New Reality of Scaling a Business to $100MM in Revenue

MODERATOR: Bob Tedeschi, New York Times Technology Columnist

PANELISTS:

Stephen Messer, Co-Founder of Linkshare

Omar Amanat, Entrepreneur in Residence, Wharton School of Business

Marc Cenedella, Founder & CEO of TheLadders.com

Nancy Pedot, Former CEO of Gymboree & Party City

Chris McCann, President of 1-800 Flowers.com

 

Also right up there is this Friday panel at 10:30AM:

 

A Roadmap for the Entrepreneur Pt. 2: Top Venture Capitalists Reflect

MODERATOR: Murat Aktihanoglu, Founder of Centrl & Entrepreneurs Roundtable

PANELISTS:

Albert Wenger, Partner at Union Square Ventures

Jim Robinson, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of RRE Ventures

Anthony Marino, Managing Partner at Virgin Investments

Howard Morgan, Partner at First Round Capital

 

=========================================

This weekend is Startup Weekend.  Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects. 

David Kidder will be speaking Friday night while Nate Westheimer, Sam Lessin, and I will be on the Sunday night panel.

Where are all the NY tech and small business reporters?

Charlie O'Donnell
Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

On Tuesday, October 13th, at 6:30PM, 100 Founders and CEO’s of NYC tech companies will gather at Sun Microsystems for nextNY’s “NYC Media: Meet the startups” event.

The idea behind the event was that, on a pretty regular basis, tech and small business reporters find their way to me and want to know about the “comeback” or “birth” or “rebirth” or whatever of the NY tech scene.  Then I have to tell them all about the fact that we’ve been here for years, heads down working.  Half the time, they don’t know about the most successful startups or the most innovative ones. 

It’s not easy, either.  NYC startups blend in pretty easy—squatting in other offices, in coffee shops, in their own apartments.  You never know when the two dudes in the back of your Williamsburgh design showroom are actually a couple of hackers trying to change the world.

Therefore, I thought it would be great to gather a bunch of NYC’s really awesome startups together in  one room—and that’s what we’ll have.  There will be 100 Founders and CEOs of NYC startups all in one room, including:


Brian Adams – AdMeld

(Raised $15 mil in two VC rounds since 11/08)
Seth Besmertnik – Conductor

(Raised $12 mil, including $10 mil this year from Matrix Partners and Firstmark)		  
Zephrim Lasker – Pontiflex

(Raised $8.75 mil since 4/08)
 
Anthony Volodkin – Hype Machine

(Doesn’t need VC to be cool… Inc Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30)
Dave Morgan – Simulmedia


(Founder of Tacoda, sold to AOL for $275 million)
Geoff Lewis – Udorse

Up and comer from TechCrunch 50 - $500k from Founders Fund, Private Beta

 

So the big question is… where are all the local tech and small business reporters covering this?  We’re going to have Jenna Wortham from the NY Times and John Abell from Wired, but I expected journalists to be tripping over themselves for this and we haven’t seen it yet. 

Where have all the reporters gone??   If you cover innovation, small business, technology, etc. you absolutely need to be here!  We’re also going to include a short presention called “Your Guide to the NYC Tech Community”.  Reporters, RSVP here!

PS… If you are an entrepreneur, we are sold out (or more like free’d out, since everything at nextNY is always free).  Please do not try to sneak in with a media ticket.  I will find you and hunt you down like the dog that you are.  Grazie.

Unintentional Benefits and a Test for NYC Seed

Charlie O'Donnell
Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

Last December,  Owen Davis from NYC Seed decided to make my company, Path 101, the fund's first investment.  Given my recent announcement that I'm taking a full time job at First Round Capital and that the Path 101 team is going part time, I have to imagine we've been written off as an investment--from a financial point of view.  God help the next company that has to pitch to the NYC Seed board now.  The board is a room full of about a dozen folks, which is about ten people too many for making early bets on seed stage companies.    Undoubtedly their mindset after the news will shift even further to risk mitigation versus additional risk taking, especially after what our experience might be saying about the funding environment. 

That would be a mistake, however.  Experienced angel investors know that a 50% loss rate is about average--they expect half their portfolio not to return any capital.  That's how the business works.  So, if another NYC Seed company fails soon, that would pretty much be well within normal expectations.  I feel like a group of government folks isn't really going to buy that, but they have to.  The Bloomberg administration trumpeted the fund as a way to spur on innovative technology ideas and fill the funding gap for cutting edge startups.  If it had to only pick from companies that could break even on $200k, you'd see little in the way of large scale market disruption coming from these companies.  In other words, you don't pick the next Google by mandating that the company generate enough funds to cover itself within the next nine months.  You might as well invest in a couple of accounting firms or food stores--very little chance of losing your money on those. 

In fact, one could easily make the argument that a heck of a lot of good could be done while still losing the whole entire fund--laying a big fat goose egg.  People learn a lot from failure, and having a culture that excepts high failure rates is critical to a truly innovative scene.  Also, when companies don't work out, founders and employees often move on to other startups, taking their experience and making themselves more prepared for the next challenge.

Take the investment in Path 101, for example.  By enabling us to continue an extra year, we were able to build better relationships with the innovation community and investors.  I was able to pitch and continue communication with Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital.  In turn, First Round is now opening an office here in NYC.  There's no doubt in my mind that First Round will invest *at least* $2 million more dollars in NYC than they would have anyway now that they have an office here--so this development is actually a net positive for the city.  We all said there wasn't enough early stage capital located in NYC, and now, we have a new top tier VC fund setting up shop right in the Union Square/Shakeshackville area.  Add in the fact that my partner Alex Lines is joining Betaworks.  Who knows, he could hack something up that winds up becoming huge.  In a way, NYC Seed enabled him to find someone to fund his hacking.

Plus, we've now unleashed machine learning PhD/scientist Hilary Mason's data mining expertise on the NYC startup market.  After moving here to NYC, she's now looking for neat data projects to work on, particularly locally.  She has a highly soughtafter expertise and our company attracted her back to NYC in the first place. 

By allowing the Path 101 team more time to be out there in the market, NYC Seed unintentionally deposited some innovative human capital back into the innovation ecology here.  The results are likely to be way better than anything just our one company had a realistic shot at, but I wonder how this fund will be measured...  Net returns or overall economic impact.  I hope the board will take a broader view of the impact of the fund and even extend it's life past the mandate for $2 million.  It certainly can't help the portfolio's risk profile if Owen is making bets thinking he's only got six bullets left in his gun and that's what he's going to be judged by.

Why Yelp (...and Every Single Retail Establishment) Should Support Foursquare

Charlie O'Donnell
Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

When I first heard of Foursquare, I'll admit that I didn't jump on it right away.  I knew the founders, Dennis and Naveen (see photo below), but I'm not really much of a gamer, nor am I much of a bar hopper, so the idea of turning my nightlife into a competition didn't seem so appealing to me (especially when working on Path 101 sucks up so much of my nightlife).  Plus, I don't have an iPhone, so that seemed like it should be the third strike for me.

However, I discovered my own reason for using it.  I was talking with a friend about how I stumbled into a great restaurant (August) walking around Greenwich Village, but couldn't remember the name of it.  I was saying how I wished there was an app that pulled my credit card data to track where I had been.  I was always forgetting the places I had gone.

"Why don't you use Foursquare?"

Aaaaaah.  That made so much sense.  Forget the game.  Forget the bar hopping.  Foursquare would be a dirt simple way to just record the places I had been--and that's all I wanted to do with it.  I signed up and started using it through the mobile site on my Sprint Mogul.  I'll admit, I quickly got hooked.

I definitely started getting sucked into the game, too.  Getting badges and seeing where my friends were was fun.  The other night, I realized that I was about to go to a place that Mike Galpert had been to about an hour or so before me, so I called him to ask what he had.  Indeed, the spinach gnocci at Supper was excellent.

That's when I realized how valuable Foursquare really is from a business perspective.  Mike made a recommendation to me, but Foursquare was the service that actually knew that I went, because I checked in.  Being able to connect web advertising, recommendations, and social media buzz to an actual person walking into your store has long been the holy grail of the advertising world.  We spent lots of money and effort online to drum up our brand, but does it actually drive food traffic?  Foursquare knows.

Think about it from Yelp's perspective.  Yelp helps you figure out where to eat, and gives you recommendations, but it only knows about the people who write reviews.  That represents only a small percentage of the overall Yelp traffic--so while Yelp tries to make the business case for advertising and using it's retail services, it doesn't really know how much real live foot traffic it drives.  Foursquare is the missing link, enabling you to come full circle from a review or recommendation to an in person visit from a real customer.  Best of all, it has figured out a compelling reason to get you to submit that data--in the form of a fun game you play with your friends. 

Additionally valuable is that the game syncs up with Twitter and Facebook, so Foursquare users are telling the world where they are and the places they've visited at any given moment.

What Foursquare does is even more valuable than the Yelp mobile app itself.  It not only records where you've been, but it also encourages others to visit the same place and join you.  If I was a business, and I had the choice of getting all my customers on Yelp or on Foursquare, Foursquare seems much more compelling.  It's not about reviews so much, so I have less downside of a bad rating or review killing my business.  Plus, it encourages others who aren't even on the app to come join their friends and check out my business.  More Foursquare users will check in and promote my store than the number of Yelpers who will rate my store and then publish that rating.  On top of that, Foursquare helps me identify who my best customers are, putting a name to a face.

So if I'm Yelp, Foursquare has valuable data that I need--whether or not my recommendations are actually driving anyone to visit the store--and has a much more compelling social media network effect.  Yelp's current social network isn't well tied to their site.  I can have friends on Yelp, but it's not totally clear how having friends improves my navigation of the site or my ability to get ratings--as opposed to Foursquare which is all about tight networks of friends. 

But Yelp also has stuff that Foursquare really needs--distribution and content.  A deal or some funding from Yelp could put Foursquare on the map as the default "Where am I now?" app and make Yelp's social media offering to a business complete and compelling.  They'd finally be able to figure out exactly how much traffic their site drives in the door.  They'd know which reviewers were the most influential--not just to other reviewers but to actual paying customers.

I think Yelp needs to act fast on this, because if I'm Foursquare, I'd start going straight to retail establishments and striking deals.  I'd get every single Starbucks to start encouraging their customers to use Foursquare and check-in to their favorite Starbucks.  I'd know whether or not that was driving feet in the door from other check-ins and who my best customers were.  Foursquare should built a neat little self serve portal that allows retailers to claim their establishments, and track who's coming in and when. 

Yelp has an "Elite" badge for the best users of Yelp, but how long before Foursquare allows retailers to create their own Elite badges for their best customers--rewarding people who support the store, not just the ratings site.   If I'm Shake Shack, I want to know who the Shake Shack Elite is, not the Yelp Elite--the latter doesn't really directly help me as a business.  The more a site enables me to have a direct relationship with my customers, the more valuable it's going to be for me and overall.  Starbucks, Jamba Juice, NYSC, Dunkin Donuts, etc. should be all over FourSquare right now trying to figure out how to get their customers on it. 

If Yelp doesn't strike up a distribution deal with Foursquare soon, I think they're going to regret it.  The deal is simple.  We'll invest a couple hundred grand in you and promote you to our users.  You give us the data (through a sync to Yelp accounts) of who goes to an establishment based on a Yelp review.  That will help Yelp sell it's service to retailers and restaurants.  Yelp should provide reviews in Foursquare in exchange for promoting Foursquare's "Tips" and "ToDo's" as well. 

Google proved that you needed to be able to tell a retailer exactly how advertising helps their business and help them track ROI.  Foursquare is well positioned to capture that all important retail visit--the hardest piece of data to get short of diving into your credit card statement.  That makes them a serious player in the local ad space--and one that will undoubtedly pass on an early Google exit based on Crowley's past experience. 

Path 101 is hiring a developer: What we want out of both the person and the resume...and who we are.

Charlie O'Donnell
Path 101, Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

Path 101, the company I started with our CTO and Co-Founder, Alex Lines, is looking to hire a developer.

Over and above anything else, here's the kind of person we want:

  • Someone with a sense of ownership and pride in their work.  We get that nothing can ever be perfect, but you need to constantly strive to make things better.  This means not only making stuff works, but that it's easy to use and makes sense--and that you try to make it easier to use and more interesting everyday.
  • You see the bigger picture--you realize that there are really exciting things to work on and then there's bug fixing--but at the end of the day you're happy we're moving forward as a team, as a company, and as a product. 
  • You really hate when stuff breaks or it sucks and it keeps you up at night.
  • You're friendly and/or interesting and are just cool to hangout with--not too uptight to break for a snowball fight in the park or to randomly pass funny images to the rest of the team on chat.

As for the tech stuff, an intelligent, curious, ambitious person can learn anything, that's true, but ideally you'd be an intelligent, curious, ambitious person AND be as much of the following as possible:

  • experienced web developer
  • very strong understanding of python
  • extensive experience with django - you know its strengths and
    weaknesses, its ecosystem of libraries and components, participate in
    django community <-- This is ideal, but if you're strong in python, let's chat.
  • obsessed with performance
  • you can talk for hours about caching <--Alex's criteria, not mine.  Don't talk to me about caching... ever.
  • experience with mysql
  • know how to properly normalize a data model as well as the costs and
    benefits of denormalization
  • strong unix/linux background
  • conversant in html/css/javascript
  • familiarity with column-oriented / key-value stores is a plus

We'll accept a resume but prefer a link to your blog and linkedin profile.

Here are some things you might what to know about us:

  • We're helping people figure out their careers.  While this might not be feeding the poor, helping someone figure out what they want to do that makes them happy can really make a significant impact in someone's life. 
  • We're doing it in an innovative way--by crawling the web for resumes and laying on interesting user data, like personality, blogs, tags, anything you want to tell us about yourself--in order to figure out what everyone's really doing with their careers.  This way, we can help you put your career in a context and figure out what "people like me" do for a living.  There are around 10 million resumes out there and we're going to crawl every last one of them.
  • We're funded by some seriously smart and successful angels like Roger Ehrenberg, Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Scott Heiferman, Jeff Jarvis, Hunter Walk, Jeff Stewart, Peter Hershberg, Joshua Stylman, Brian Harniman, Shripriya Mahesh, and others...
  • We were the first company to ever get an investment by the recently launched NYC Seed fund. 
  • We're really passionate and dedicated to what we're doing.
  • Team:  Charlie (@ceonyc), Alex (@alexlines), and Hilary (@hmason), as well as some super awesome contract folks.

 

So, tweet @ us, e-mail us, or leave a comment.   But please, no recruiters.  We can't afford a recruiter, so there's really just no point to reaching out.  We're really serious.  Really.  Serious.

 

 

EnergyHub: The coolest NYC company you've probably never heard of raises money

Charlie O'Donnell
Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

New York City based EnergyHub just received it's first round of venture financing, from Physic Ventures and .406 Ventures.   News on the financing from NYC journalists: conspicuously absent.  Wake up, folks!  It was on VentureBeat last night! 

That's exciting to me for a number of reasons.  First of all, what they do is very cool.  The company makes information systems that help you monitor your energy usage.   This way, instead of a bill with just the bottom line of how many Kilowatt hours you used last month, you can get an in-depth view of how you're using energy.  This is key to reducing peak consumption and lowering your costs.  It would certainly be nice to know how much money and power my computer is costing me each day.

What's very cool is that I got the opportunity to work with the founders, Seth and Tom, at ITAC's FastTrac class, where I am the Entrepreneur-in-Residence.  (In this case, EIR is a fancy way of saying that I'm the class instructor and good utility guy to have close by to help startups working with ITAC).  If you're interested in future FastTrac programs given by ITAC, you should contact Veronica Price at vprice@itac.org.  There are a lot of programs, consultants and advisors for startups in NYC--

They come out of Honeybee Robotics, a New York-based company that builds hardware for NASA’s Mars missions and the Department of Defense.  Who said everything in NYC was about finance, advertising and media?  They're really awesome guys and I'm glad to see them get their funding.  I can't wait to be able to buy an EnergyHub system for my apartment.

What's also great is that they got money from .406 Ventures--making this .406's 2nd investment in Brooklyn (they're also in Kaltura).  I had the opportunity to talk to Larry Begley in the fall and he was super smart and extremely approachable.  Hopefully, there will be more NYC-area based investing from .406 in the future. 

BTW...  Good thing Ted Williams choose to play that final day of the season.  .39955 Ventures just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Who is teaching young entrepreneurs in NYC? Getting NYC educators interested in entrepreneurship together.

Charlie O'Donnell
Teaching, Venture Capital & Technology, nextNY

In any given week, I meet with two or three entrepreneurs who want to talk with me about their business--just to get some feedback.  They know that I used to be on the venture capital side and vet business plans and ideas on a regular business.  I'm happy to do it when I take some interest in the idea, mostly when I feel like I can add some value.  Plus, I feel like it's actually useful for my own business--to see what technologies and processes other people are using and to help generate new ideas.  I've been very fortunate to learn from folks like the guys at Union Square Ventures, to see successful companies get launched and grown, and to have the opportunity to run a business on my own, so I do feel like I have something to add.  That's why I'm teaching entrepreneurship at Fordham University.

However, I'd imagine finding me as an up and coming entrepreneur must feel a little bit like finding the A-Team--especially if you weren't in established innovation networks.  You can't even go see Mr. Lee at the Chinese laundry first.  (If you don't get it, you didn't grow up in the 80's.)  I don't put myself out there as an expert for hire or have a fancy nickname for myself like Dr. Startup.  In fact, a lot of really good people in NYC to talk to about your startup idea are totally under the radar--just helping give feedback to whoever just happens to stumble into their network.

On the other hand, a lot of the people most above the radar on this kind of thing aren't exactly people I'd recommend to go see.  I have to assume every city has this, but I like to call them the "Venture Vultures"--various startup strategy folks with murky resumes who will promise to connect you to capital, technology help, strategy help who simply don't have a lot of there there.  In the Web 2.0 boom, tons of people hung up shingles offering to up startup businesses, and I'm hoping the recession will weed out most of these folks, because I think a lot of them do more harm than good.  When entrepreneurs with real potential run into these pseudo-virtual incubator strategy consulting types and get bad advice or no real results, and that's who they see trumpeting themselves in the community, it gives the community a bad name. 

The reason why these folks can self-promote their way to noteriety, however, is because of an educational vacuum for new businesses in NYC.  If you had an idea for a new business, or you had already built a product, service, or technology and you needed business strategy help, where would you go?  What about if you were a student?

If we really wanted to improve NYC's ability to support innovation, more so than money or space, I think putting more effort into educating students about entrepreneurship would be worthwhile.  The bottleneck for creating new companies in NYC isn't desks or angel capital--we have plenty of both--it's the fact that there just aren't enough entrepreneurs with good ideas who know how to execute on a business.  We need more students learning the technologies that allow innovation and more students taught how to turn their passions into ideas--and then into businesses (or just find their passions in the first place).

EDIT: Let's be clear on what I'm saying.  I think NYC is a great place to start a business--I just think that not enough of the best local minds are in the mindset that such an endeavor is possible or worthwhile.  On top of that, those that really want to learn need more access to the experienced people who can teach them best practices.  I actually think the infrastructure for a startup here in NYC is pretty good--we're just not getting enough new entrepreneurs at the top of the funnel.  New York City schools don't exactly pump out lots of students with the business or tech wherewithal (or interest) in starting a new company (athough perhaps that might change now that they can't just assume they'll get hired by big banks anymore).  NYC students are taught how to work for big companies, not to start small ones. 

I'm specificially interested in programs for students.  It's an entirely different thing to take someone who has already established themselves in a career and help them with a new business idea.  They at least have networks.  They know people in their industry and they have a sense of how to create value. 

I want to meet whoever is working with local students.   In fact, Fordham has generously donated space for about 100 people during the day from 9-5 at their Lincoln Center Campus on Tuesday, April 28th to bring everyone educating local students interested in entrepreneurship together.  I'd like to hold a small conference to share ideas, solutions, best practices, and step one is figuring out who is out there.

If you are involved with a university incubator, tech transfer office, entrepreneurship program, degree, or certificate, or if you just teach students in programs and subjects likely to create innovators, please get in touch with me.

I've created a form to gather all the interested parties.  Even if you can't make it on that day, please let me know who you are and what you do.

You can find the form by clicking this link.

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