Starting Up in Silicon Alley
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Date: Thursday, September 18
Time: 11:35 - 12:25PM
Location: 1A06 &07
Track: Landscape & Strategy
Tags Landscape & Strategy, silicon alley, startup, Panel, VC
What is unique about starting up a company in New York City? What are the unique advantages, disadvantages, loopholes and barriers?
With this panel of people from all aspects of the startup community, we’ll explore these issues and questions submitted ahead of time from the audience.
On the panel, we’ll have:
Kevin Ryan, CEO & Co-Founder of AlleyCorp
Kevin P. Ryan, one of Silicon Alley’s most well known Internet entrepreneurs, has started six New York-based businesses – Alley Insider, Gilt Groupe, Music Nation, Panther Express, ShopWiki and 10gen – in the past three years. He presently serves as chairman and CEO of AlleyCorp, which oversees each of the six companies. Prior to AlleyCorp, Kevin was first president then later became CEO of DoubleClick. There, he was instrumental in building the company from a 20-person startup to a global leader with over 1500 employees.
David Rose, Principal of Rose Tech Ventures & Chairman of the New York Angels
David S. Rose is an entrepreneurial executive and investor with extensive experience in high technology and communications, angel investments, finance and government. He was named by Inc. magazine to the 1998 Inc 500 list as CEO of one of the fastest growing private companies in America. Red Herring magazine has described him as “a patriarch of New York’s Silicon Alley” and Crain’s New York Business named him one of the City’s 25 most influential technology executives.
Karin Klein, Vice President of SoftBank Capital
Ms. Klein joined SoftBank Capital in 2000 and specializes in business development and evaluating and identifying new investment opportunities. She has over 10 years of private equity and operating experience. Prior to joining SoftBank Capital, Ms. Klein analyzed investment opportunities for the private equity firm Chartwell Investments and helped build some of its existing holdings. She also previously worked for the MC Group and Knowledge Universe.
Moderator:
Nate Westheimer, Entrepreneur in Residence at Rose Tech Ventures
Nate Westheimer is the Entrepreneur in Residence at Rose Tech Ventures – New York City’s leader in early stage investing. Formerly, Nate founded BricaBox.com (a next generation wiki platform) and served at the Technology Strategist for National Public Media. Nate blogs at innonate.com and guest writes for Silicon Alley Insider, among other outlets.
Comments
Hi Nate, as far as I'm concerned it would be nice to hear something about the opportunities for non US companies (I'm based in London btw) to raise money from NY investors in order to expand operations to the US market.
Thanks
Nate, i didn't get to the panel, but did get to the web2open session on Starting Up in Silicon Alley. Outstanding. Here are my thoughts:
I think it was key to have free access to that panel. Those who are starting up cannot always afford to buy the pass to the other sessions.
Even though it was meant to be "unconference" putting the panel at the front worked well. I don't get in front of these people often, so it was nice to hear all of their opinions instead of just one at a table.
I asked a question about how a not-ready-to-be-funded startup can take advantage of the nonmonetary value of investors (connections, leads, etc.) and your answers were spot-on. NYC has a ton of startup community organizations and everyone should know about them - thanks for sharing.
Panel did a great job focusing not on "what i did to make it in nyc" but on "what you can do to get past the obstacles you are facing now"
There were some good questions, but i wonder how the attendees can be encouraged to consider what information they really want from the panel. The best participants were not hoping for "the secret" they were getting answers to what are some of the steps and how can those be executed best with the resources available in nyc.
Thanks for putting together the panel and, especially, for all your work on web2Open.
Everyone was great on the pannel, but Mr. Rose's perspective on changs in the cost of entry were facinating.
Excellent panel, helped give me much insight on how the current state of investors to startups is.
Any topics you want us to cover? I'm talking with my panel this afternoon.
Thanks!