Alchemist Series Event: Pimp My Business - How to Fundraise

The Alchemist Series: A Six Part Speaker Series to accelerate the transformation of hackers into entrepreneurs.

Please join us for the third chapter of The Alchemist Series where we provide a toolkit to become the founder of the next startup that everybody is talking about.

Our panelists are:

Patrick Chiang, Five Apes

Howard Hartenbaum, August Capital

Naval Ravikant, AngelList

The panel is moderated by Ravi Belani (Startup advisor and seed investor)

Panelists:

Patrick Chiang, CEO and President, joined technologist and Founder, Williams Paquier in founding the business operations of Five Apes in late 2010. Five Apes is an early stage stealth company, whose core technology platform reflects a paradigm shift in information representation and processing.  Prior to Five Apes, Patrick was part of the original founding team at Aliph for the Jawbone consumer business serving as Chief Financial Officer & Vice President of Business Operations.  Patrick and Aliph’s two founders, developed the business plan, concept and strategy to transform Aliph from a DARPA funded R&D company developing technology for military applications into the award-winning consumer electronics company behind the Jawbone Bluetooth headset. In this role, Patrick led all three of Aliph’s venture financing rounds, raising in excess of $40M from Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Mayfield Fund. 

While attending Harvard Business School and upon graduation, Patrick served a brief stint as a venture investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he focused on Internet, mobile and software investments.  Patrick has also previously held business development and corporate development/finance positions at Loudcloud, Inc. (Nasdaq: LDCL), which eventually became Opsware, Inc. (Nasdaq: OPSW, acquired by HP).  Patrick holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Howard Hartenbaum joined August Capital in 2008. Prior to joining, he served as a General Partner at Draper Richards LP where he was the founding investor in Skype and a former member of the board of directors where his achievement resulted in his joining the Forbes Midas List of top venture capitalists.

Before entering the venture capital field, Howard was at Hughes Electronics, where he was responsible for supporting business development, marketing and sales of satellite, information security and automotive technologies developed by HRL Laboratories. He also worked in engineering positions in ergonomics and user experience at Honda Motor Company and manufacturing at Teledyne Relays.

Howard has worked overseas for a total of ten years in Luxembourg and Japan. He is a graduate of M.I.T.

Current Investments: Livemocha, Memolane, Pixazza and Swoopo.

Previous investments: Skype (acquired by eBay – EBAY), Photobucket (acquired by Fox Interactive Media – NWS), Bebo (acquired by AOL – TWX) and Netkraft (acquired by Adea Solutions)

Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList. Previously, he was a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (largest white-label classifieds marketplace). Naval has advised Bix.com, iPivot, and XFire, among others, and invested in many companies, including Twitter, FourSquare, DocVerse (sold to Google), Mixer Labs (sold to Twitter), Jambool (Social Gold), SnapLogic, PlanCast, Stack Overflow, Heyzap, and Disqus. Naval holds B.S. in Computer Science and Economics from Dartmouth College.

Moderator:

Ravi Belani is an advisor and seed investor in startups, including Komli, Justin.TV, Badgeville, Ondeego, Redux, and Booshaka. Ravi formerly spent six years as part of the internet investment team at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, where he led investments and served as a board member or observer on numerous companies, including Pubmatic, Vizu, and Yield Software. Prior to Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ravi worked in product management at software startup Zaplet (acquired by MetricStream) and enterprise software company Extensity (IPOd then acquired by GEAC). Ravi has also worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and Company's San Francisco office, at Medtronic on wireless communication technologies for remote patient monitoring ,and in equity research at Bridgewater Associates.

 

Ravi is a Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi graduate of Stanford University, holding a BS with Distinction and MS in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management. Ravi also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. As a Board Fellow at Harvard, Ravi served the Global Board of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs). Ravi is also a graduate of the Kauffman Fellows Program.

Office Hours with Todd Rumberger, Greenberg Traurig:

E. Thom ("Todd") Rumberger Jr. works with start up and emerging growth stage companies in the internet, software, communications, semiconductor, media and entertainment industries, and with the venture capital firms, other private equity investors and investment bankers involved in such co mpanies. Formerly with a Silicon Valley based venture capital firm, his practice focuses on representing start-up and emerging growth companies in matters ranging from formation, capitalization, and key executive employment matters to early and later stage financings (convertible debt and preferred equity), strategic partner and customer agreements, and acquisitions.  Todd also handles general corporate matters and transactions, with wide-ranging experience in domestic and international mergers and acquisitions, buy-outs, complex commercial joint ventures and strategic partnering (with a special emphasis on Russia and Eastern Europe), and commercial space ventures.

Founders Hookup – Speed Dating for High Caliber Internet Entrepreneurs:

Founders Hookup is speed dating for internet founders based on a residency-match system. You apply, rank the other co-founder seekers, they rank you, and the organizers match up the pairs with the lowest combined rankings (like a medical residency match system). Matched pairs have 15 minute “speed dates”. More information at: foundershookup.com.

 

The Alchemist Series

The Alchemist Series is targeted at young alums of Ivy League / Ivy League caliber universities with Computer Science and Engineering backgrounds.

The events are panel-driven discussions exploring significant milestones in the trajectory of the development of a business. The intent is to provide a toolkit to accelerate the progress over the six sessions.

The events will be held in the evenings on the 4th Wednesday of the months of September, November, January, March, May, and July from 2010– 2011. The venue host is Greenberg Traurig's office in San Francisco.

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