3175 Hanover St
Palo Alto, California 94304

SVASE Main Event: Failing Right!

Start: 05/05/2011 - 6:00 pm
End: 05/05/2011- 8:30 pm

Contact: Laura Weigant
Email: [email protected]

Location: Cooley LLP
3175 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304

URL:-www.svase.org/events/main-event-failing-right

Failing Right!

"The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn't fail. It still didn't really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal." Max Levchin, Co-Founder PayPal.

Most entrepreneurs - if they can survive the course! – will have experiences similar to Max’s: several startups, learning from the mistakes along the way, and leveraging those learning experiences to reach further each time, until finally breaking through to success. This makes sense. You’d be astounded if you became a rock virtuoso or a golf champion by just picking up a guitar or a bag of clubs, so why should making a business success of a startup be any different?

So if failing, and learning from those failures, is part of the process, how can you reduce the time, plus financial and emotional capital you’ll expend, to get to success as quickly and painlessly as possible?

With lots of experience in both success and failure, our panel will look to answer the following questions, and more:

• Larry & Sergei got to the brass ring straight out of the gate – so why can’t I?
• If all customers want is a faster horse that eats less, is talking to customers the best way to come up with a game changing product?
• If I build a minimum viable product, and develop customers, am I good to go….. or is something else still gonna trip me up?
• Do I stick to my long term vision, or must I continually twist & pivot, depending on which way the wind is blowing?
• I’m a geek, and I like coming up with ideas & building things. Do I really have to talk with customers, and figure out things like business models & how to support my product long term, or can I leave it to others?
• So many things seem to be out of my control – the economy, what the Big Boys come out with at the same time as me, even the weather – so is it more about timing that learning?
• Is each startup different for the founders, or are there common failure patterns that we can learn from?

The Panel:
David Hornick, Partner, August CapitalJoe Beninato, Serial Entrepreneur, founder, Tello
Seth Sternberg, Founder, Meebo
Roy Thiele- Sardiña, Managing Director, Highbar Ventures

Moderator: TBD

When: Thursday, May 5
6:00 – 7:00 pm Networking and hors d’oeuvres
7:00 - 8:15 pm Panel discussion and Q&A
8:15 - 8:30 pm Additional networking

Location: Cooley LLP, 3175 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304

Pre-Registered Rates (All Rates Include Hors D’oeuvres):
Members - $20; Affiliates who advertise this event - $29; General Public - $49

Pre-registration closes at 9 PM the night before the event.

Walk-In Rates: Add $10.00 to the listed price

To reserve an Exhibit Table, please contact [email protected], $350 Members, $850 Non-members (Includes exhibit table, 2 tickets to the event and 1-year corporate membership).

Seating is limited, so early registration is recommended to avoid disappointment on the day.

This event is co-sponsored by Cooley LLP, www.cooley.com.

Speaker Bios:

David Hornick, Partner, August Capital
For more than a decade, David has worked with technology startups throughout the software sector. In 2000, David joined August Capital to invest broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on enterprise application and infrastructure software, as well as consumer facing software and services.

Prior to joining August Capital, David was an intellectual property and corporate attorney at Venture Law Group and Perkins Coie. In his legal practice, David represented high tech startups in all aspects of their formation, financing, and operations, including the likes of Yahoo!, Evite (Ticketmaster) and Ofoto (Kodak). Before that, David was a litigator in New York City at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

David has an eclectic educational background. He holds an AB in Computer Music from Stanford University, an M.Phil in Criminology from Cambridge University and a JD from Harvard Law School.

David is currently a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches intellectual property, and the Harvard Law School, where he teaches entrepreneurship and venture capital. He is the author of VentureBlog, the first venture capital blog, and VentureCast, the first venture capital podcast, and is the founder and executive producer of The Lobby conference, an annual gathering of the thought leaders of the digital media ecosystem.

Current Board Affiliations: Gravity, Nomis, Ohai, Splunk, StumbleUpon, SAY
Media
Additional Current Investments: Bill.com, eBates, LiveOps, PayNearMe, Technorati
Previous investments: Aardvark (acquired by Google), DoneRight (acquired by LendingTree), Evite (acquired by Ticketmaster), Jaxtr (acquired by Sabse Bolo), PayCycle (acquired by Intuit), RedSwoosh (acquired by Akamai), Notiva (acquired by Oracle), Tickle (acquired by Monster)

Joe Beninato, Founder, Tello
Joe loves startups. His first entrepreneurial experience was watching his grandfather and father run a successful restaurant in Chicago for over 50 years.

Since graduating from MIT with a degree in aerospace engineering, he has worked with more than fifteen startups, serving as founder, employee, investor or advisor. Joe most recently was the founder and CEO of Presto, a venture-backed startup in partnership with Hewlett-Packard. Before founding Presto, he was Vice President of Product Marketing & Business Development at Roku. Prior to Roku, Joe founded and served as Vice President of Marketing for When.com, the leading Internet calendar and event service that was acquired by America Online. Joe has spearheaded marketing and product efforts for Books That Work (acquired by Sierra OnLine), Integrated Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: INTS, later merged with Wind River Systems) and S3 Inc. (NASDAQ: SIII, later known as SONICBlue).

Actively involved in the Silicon Valley startup community, Joe has served on the board of directors for Presto, When.com, eDaycare (acquired by Arrowsight), and the non-profit Churchill Club. He has acted as an investor or advisor for Bigstep (acquired by Affinity Internet), Ofoto (acquired by Kodak), and numerous other companies. Joe has served as a mentor for the Stanford University Technology Venture Formation class and the fbFund REV incubator program.

Seth Sternberg, Founder, Meebo
Seth majored in Political Science at Yale. He then worked at IBM in the M&A group before he went to Stanford's Business School.

Seth flies airplanes (less than he'd like to, but it's expensive!), rides motorcycles, and rollerblades.

Roy Theile-Sardiña, Managing Director, Highbar Ventures
Roy Thiele-Sardiña is a successful venture capitalist and entrepreneur with over 25 years of investment and operating experience in the technology industry. Mr. Thiele-Sardiña most recently was Managing Director at Steelpoint Capital (a spin-out of the private equity group of Moore Capital Management). He initiated the firm's infrastructure investments in storage and security.

Roy was also an Executive-In-Residence at the Mayfield Fund. He evaluated the storage and security space for the firm and initiated Mayfield's investment in Mendocino Software.

Before becoming an angel investor and venture capitalist, Mr. Thiele-Sardiña was a highly regarded operating executive. He was co-founder & CEO of Ingrian Networks, a leading data privacy provider, and co-founder and CEO of Tasmania Networks, a cache proxy company (acquired by Cisco). He was also a member of the founding management team for Brocade Communications Systems. As Brocade's Vice President of Sales and Business Development, he signed the company's original OEM agreements.

Prior to Brocade, he worked at Sun Microsystems for eleven years. While at Sun, Mr. Thiele-Sardiña started the company's telco business and grew it to 10% of Sun's worldwide revenue. He later led Sun's international sales and business development team (Asia, Japan, Latin America and EMEA), and subsequently was responsible for the company's corporate development organization in the Office of the Chairman.

Mr. Thiele-Sardiña holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from New York University, Stern School of Business.

Official Website: http://www.svase.org/events/main-event-failing-right

Added by svaseinfo on April 20, 2011