Events & Recaps Articles

On March 28th, 2012, Joe Chin held his Best Practices Meetup at NYU's Stern School of Business.  The featured speakers were Jared Hecht of GroupMe and Ben Lerer of Thrillist and Lerer Ventures.  The topic of the discussion was Creating New Markets.  Jared is a Co-Founder of GroupMe, the group messaging service that was acquired by Skype in August, 2011 for more than $50 million.  Ben is the Co-Founder/CEO of Thrillist Media Group (Thrillist, Jackthreads), which has $40 million in revenue and 4 million subscribers.  Ben is also Co-Founder/Managing Director of Lerer Ventures, a seed stage venture capital fund which has invested in over 100 media and technology companies.

In one of the more interesting recent startup panels, TiE (The Indian Entrepreneurs) NYC hosted a panel discussion on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at the NYC offices of King & Spalding at 1185 Avenue of the Americas.  The discussion, titled "Jumpstart Your Idea - Taking the Plunge and Starting Your Dream Venture", featured Brooklyn Bridge Ventures' Charlie O'Donnell, Mojiva's Miles Spencer and Hotlist's Gianni Martire discussing common scenarios all entrepreneurs face when embarking on their first venture.

On Thursday, March 8th, 2012, Ultra Light Startups hosted its monthly Investor Feedback Forum and Pitch Showdown at Microsoft's NYC headquarters at 1290 Avenue of the Americas.  The Forum featured short presentations by nine (9) startups to an all-star panel of entrepreneurs and investors including First Round Capital's Phin Barnes, Paladin Capital Group's Bill Reinisch, ER Accelerator's Murat Aktihanoglu and Visual Revenue's Dennis Mortensen (billed as the ultimate bootstrapper).

The nine (9) presenting startups included Take the Interview's Danielle Weinblatt, Dealsurf's Damien Rottemberg, Favorly's Jonathan Daily, Sqoot's Mo Yehia, The Funday Genie's Joseph Foxton, LeadPlace's Ray Schmitz, Broodr's Jason Blanck, Buddha's David Montoya (fresh off his presentation the previous evening at Worldwide Investor Network) and USEED's Brian Sowards.

Judging by the evening's presentations, the daily deal and flash sales spaces continue to avoid market saturation and garner investor and entrepreneur interest.

The European-American Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. presented a European-American Economic Forum on Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 at the Union League Club in NYC.  The topic discussed was "Currencies, Credit Ratings and the Crisis: Facing the Power of the Markets" and featured a panel discussion moderated by Justin Fox, Editorial Director of Harvard Business Review.

The panel featured John Chambers, Managing Director of Standard & Poor's Sovereign Ratings; Alberto Cribiore, Vice Chairman of Citibank; Yves-Andre Istel, Senior Partner of Rothschild Global Financial Advisory; Jared Marks, Principal of Taconic Capital Advisors, LP; and Dietmar Rieg, General Manager of Bayern LB New York Branch.

The focus of the conversation was the sovereign debt crisis facing the European Union and necessary measures required to preserve the union.  Mr. Chambers referenced an interesting story from the early days of this country, when Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson met over dinner in NYC to discuss the structure of a central bank.  Chambers felt that the subsequent creation of the Federal Reserve system allowed our country to proceed on the path to economic prosperity and that similar controls are required in Europe.

The luncheon was attended by over 125 participants.

Worldwide Investor Network hosted a reception on Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 to introduce Buddha, a recent graduate of its investment program.  Buddha is a free and revolutionary patent-pending application that helps you expand your social network and find new connections based on your personal likes, interests and location.  It removes the need to actively search for new friends and connections by letting you set up proximity alerts and shared interests.

On March 6th, 2012, the 7th Annual Small Business Summit 2012 was held at Metropolitan Pavilion, in the Flatiron District of Manhattan.  The Small Business Summit is New York's premier event for small business owners looking to network with other decision-makers, attend cutting edge seminars and shop around for products and services available to help small businesses succeed.

There were over five-hundred attendees, a great lunch spread and giveaways at many of the sponsor booths.  I particularly enjoyed stopping by to speak with Data.com (fka Jigsaw), Webgrrls and TurnStone.  Best of all, Business Insider was in the house, covering the event!

On Monday evening, March 5th, 2012, I attended an event at the Empire State Building's Empire Room, hosted by tapTank.com, a social network  focused on helping its users attain their personal goals and ambitions.  The event was billed as a Pre-South-by-Southwest Event and judging by my twitter feed, SXSW has really become the place to be for NYC's growing technology community.

I was fortunate enough to meet and have a quick conversation with Joe Choi, Founder of tapTank.com and hear more about his exciting venture.  I left relatively early, however, and was unable to catch up with uber-networkers Michael Gold and Michael Kislin!

Perhaps next year I will use tapTank.com to help me attain my goal to attend SXSW 2013...!

I recently attended the “December” NY Tech Meetup at NYU’s Skirball Center on Tuesday, 11/29/2011.  I have attended many of these events over the years at the various locations ranging from Cooper Union to IAC to 92^nd Street Y to NYU and always enjoy the format as well as the presentations.  At the most recent event, however, I have noticed the following trends in the companies presenting as well as the presentations themselves:

CRESA Partners cosponsored the January 12th, 2007 iBreakfast with Craig Newmark of Craig's List.  Here's the official event recap: 6 Billion Pageviews Worldwide It is fascinating to meet the man behind a site that grew from a "new-kid-on-the-block", programmer’s social advancement tool to a six billion page view worldwide listing phenomenon

FAST Enterprise Search is a public company founded in 1997, with 750 employees. Matching customers/employeees to communities of content and commerce, FAST features a "learning algorithm" that learns user's preferences with experience, using a semantic network. Clients include MTV, Comcast, Softbank, Zibb (B2B search). FAST's R&D group is based in Oslo, Norway.