Cox’s company, Radiator Labs,  is a venture he started in his apartment two winters ago to solve the overheating and efficiency problems associated with steam heat. The low-cost radiator retrofit that he is developing with his team aims to carefully control the amount of heat that transfers into a room from a radiator while optimizing the efficiency of the building heat system, potentially saving up to 30% of the heating costs for steam-heated buildings while dramatically increasing the comfort of the apartments within.  The waste inherent in steam heating is evident to anyone who has ever seen buildings with open windows in the middle of the winter.

Marshall’s research estimates that steam heat wastes approximately $700 million dollars each winter in Manhattan alone.  “Adopting this cost-effective technology in the millions of existing U.S. housing units with steam radiator systems has the potential to save hundreds of millions of dollars in energy costs per year and reduce carbon emissions by over 6 million tons – equivalent to taking 1.25 million automobiles off the road,” said Marshall Cox of Radiator Labs. “Winning this competition enables us to help bring this technology to the marketplace so these benefits can be realized.”

“This is an exciting and innovative design that when commercialized will noticeably reduce the cost of heating apartments, offices and other types of buildings in New England and other cold weather regions,” said Tom May, President and CEO of Northeast Utilities, the parent company of NSTAR, a major sponsor of the competition. “This competition has shown once again that the road to clean energy is being paved by young entrepreneurs.”

The MIT Clean Energy Prize is a national competition founded in 2008 by MIT, the U.S. Department of Energy and NSTAR to accelerate the pace of clean energy entrepreneurship. The 2012 edition brought together teams from across the Northeast to compete for $20,000 in category first prizes, as wel as the $200,000 Grand Prize that comes with the chance to compete in the 1st annual National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition held at the White House in mid June.

Now in its fifth year, the MIT Clean Energy Prize has launched about thirty new companies that have raised almost $90 million in venture capital and government funding to develop clean energy products, technologies and services. Open to university students, the competition aims to promote the most commercially viable solutions to reduce fossil fuel dependence, lower carbon emissions and spur economic growth.

Please join me and all other InSITE fellows in congratulating Marshall Cox.

On the news:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/01/idUS164351+01-May-2012+BW20120501

http://nstar.com/ss3/nstar_news/press_releases/2012/mit-winner.asp

Post written by Lila Pla Alemany (Columbia Business School, 2013).

Through the Smart Cities global initiative and the Smart Camps program IBM is looking to bring together entrepreneurs, investors and experienced mentors to help build a Smarter Planet.

Does your company address problems the world is facing in energy, healthcare, telecommunications or any of the other areas of Smarter Planet? If that sounds like your company and it is less than 5 years old, privately held and has a solution to make our planet smarter, please apply!

Visit ibm.co/HObJrP for the most up-to-date information.

Apply to SmartCamp here: http://bit.ly/HNH4ZN

Start ups in the following key areas are encouraged to apply:

- Government and Agency Administration
- Urban Planning
- Environmental
- Energy and Water
- Transportation
- Education
- Social and Health
- Public Safety

- Opportunity to profile their company in front of the local industry and investment community
- Mentorship from world class investors and advisors
- Exposure to IBM Industry Executive Leadership and Business Development Leaders

The winners of SmartCamp Boston will take part in a three-month mentorship with IBM and will be invited to attend the SmartCamp Global Finals. “SmartCamp was an incredible experience which connected us with an A-list of investors, advisors and industry experts” says Albert Santalo, CEO of Miami based CareCloud, a disruptive cloud-based healthcare IT company. Since being announced as 2010 SmartCamp Silicon Valley winner, CareCloud raised over $20M in Series A funding. Just one example of SmartCamp winners, worldwide, who have received venture capital investment and are making impacts in the marketplace.

Alex is a Partner at NYC-based venture capital firm Millennium Technology Ventures and focuses on investments in software and internet companies and the intersection of financial services and technology, including market structure-related investments and capital markets technologies. He is a Director at Shopify, Director at OMGPOP and Director at SelectMinds.

At Millennium, Alex led the investment in HootSuite.  Previously, Alex was involved with a wide variety of innovative companies, including board service with Yodle (local advertising), Shopify (e-commerce), Wix (web content creation tools), SelectMinds (social networking), and Quadriserv (securities lending marketplace). Alex was also involved with Bessemer’s investments in Pure Networks (acquired by Cisco), Skype (acquired by Ebay), SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee), Goal.com (acquired by Perform Group), OMGPOP (acquired by Zynga), Activ Financial, TeamViewer, and Gerson Lehrman Group.

Prior to Millennium, Alex spent six years with Bessemer Venture Partners where he was a Partner in their New York office.

Earlier in his career Alex worked at Goldman Sachs in technology investment banking, where he was involved with merger advisory and corporate finance, primarily in the IT-services and software sectors. While earning his MBA, Alex also worked as a part-time associate at both RRE Ventures and Apax Partners. Alex started his career as a software engineer at Salomon Brothers and later worked as a derivatives trader on the New York Board of Trade.

Alex earned his Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School, and a Bachelor of Science in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He co-authored the O’Reilly & Associates book, Programming .NET Web Services.

Post written by Lila Pla Alemany (CBS 2013)

]]> http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/17/alex-ferrara-receives-insites-alumni-achievement-award/feed/ 0 http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/17/new-insite-officers-elected/ http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/17/new-insite-officers-elected/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:38:32 +0000 InSITE http://insiteny.org/?p=1961 Tonight the InSITE fellows and board members gathered at P.J. Clark for our traditional end-of-year annual dinner and elections.

One of the sentences that we heard over and over again in the candidates’ speeches was ‘InSITE has been the best thing that’s happened to me in business school…’.

Many of us feel this way and  are very excited to make this organization even stronger in the months to come. Everyone will have the opportunity to take on leadership roles next year, even those who didn’t win a formal position. Fellows can start a new initiative, organize an event, write a white paper or a blog post, schedule informal meetings with investors, etc.

And this is what makes InSITE a great place. It’s up to us to shape it, nurture it and use it as a platform to pursue our passions and interests as future entrepreneurs, VC’s or whatever it is we may end up doing.

During the course of the evening, InSITE awarded this year’s Alumni Achievement Award to Board Member Alex Ferrara (CBS, InSITE ’04), a partner at Millennium Technology Ventures, and a Director at Shopify, Director at OMGPOP and Director at SelectMinds.

Here the list of the new Officers:

President: Adam Kalamchi

VP of Sourcing: Brian Bullen

VP of Partnerships: Marianna Zaslavsky

VP of Operations: Owen Kirchner

VP of Events: Austin Clements

VP of Recruiting for Columbi: Zack Lane

VP of Recruiting for NYU Stern: Kevin St. John

VP of Alumni: Ed Rayner

VP of Special Operations: Zachary Schwarzman

VP of Communications: Lila Pla Alemany

AVP of Science: Megan Meguill

We also elected two fellows to be our Young Alumni for the Board: Abe Geiger and Vicoria Cheung.

InSITE is very grateful to all the fellows who will be graduating this year, and to those who held leadership positions. A big thank you to Abe Geiger (President), Brian Malkerson (VP of Sourcing), Joe Rizk (VP of Special Operations), Ted Rosenwasser (VP of Partnerships), Vitoria Cheng (VP of Operations), Matt Puzio (VP of Events), Ellen Hukkelhoven (VP of Science Projects),Nistha Tripathi (VP of Communications), Alessandro Presti (VP of Alumni), Steve Mayne (VP of NYU Recruiting), Rebecca Allen (VP of Columbia Recruiting) and, of course, Paul Tumpowsky and InSITE’s board.

Long life to InSITE.

Post written by Lila Pla Alemany (CBS 2013)

]]> http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/17/new-insite-officers-elected/feed/ 0 http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/17/insites-spring-pitch-event-celebrates-a-year-of-growth/ http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/17/insites-spring-pitch-event-celebrates-a-year-of-growth/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 20:30:10 +0000 InSITE http://insiteny.org/?p=1966 It’s no secret that New York City’s startup ecosystem is booming. The City recently passed Boston to become the second largest venture capital investment hub, early stage investment in New York based companies has reached an all time high, and the City is now home to an ever-increasing roster of tech success stories.

As the New York startup community continues to mature and evolve, so has InSITE. This year we worked with startups in an unprecedented number of industries, broadened our services to serve increasingly later-stage companies, partnered with Sony and IBM to host the Always Be Closing event series, established the InSITE Research initiative, and launched several other special projects.

All of this hard work was on display last week at the InSITE Spring Pitch Event. The Event is our semester-capping showcase that brings together our Fellows, companies, venture capital partners, and other members of the New York startup ecosystem to share InSITE’s work and solicit investor feedback.  This semester’s Event highlighted the breadth of InSITE’s work. Featured companies ranged in maturity from pre-launch and prefunding to 6 years old and thrice funded.  They included fashion technology companies, medical hardware breakthroughs, social media apps, and everything in between.

The following list provides a snapshot of the companies that presented this semester.

·      Threadmatcher: a social fashion recommendation platform that enables users to discover and purchase new gear without fear that they’ll show up to a party wearing the same outfit as their friend.

·      BioDigital: a producer of state of the art biomedical visualization systems that improve training, communication, and the interpretation of medical information.

·      Brevity: a video technology company that enables production studios and creative enterprises to dramatically reduce video data transfer and transcoding speeds and costs.

·      Bug Labs: a machine-to-machine networking company that provides hardware and software solutions that power the “internet of things.”

·      ColdSteel Laser: a medical technology company pioneering and commercializing a minimally invasive endoscopic laser surgery hardware and software solution.

·      Social Bicycles: a bike sharing network featuring GPS-enabled bikes that riders can find and unlock using their mobile phone.

·      Lifedots: a cloud-based solution to collect, organize and connect the cherished moments of your life anywhere, anytime, in a visually dynamic way.

These entrepreneurs received feedback from a panel of early stage investors including Brian Hirsch, Founder & Managing Director at Tribeca Venture Partners, David Aronoff, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, Jordan Elpern-Waxman, Senior Associate at Genecast Ventures, and Zach Schlidhorn, Vice President and Director of Operation at Lux Capital.

The Event also featured a recap of many of the special projects that Fellows worked on this semester.  Featured projects included an InSITE Research deep dive into online video, consulting to startups in the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, and project analysis for AOL Venture’s rapid prototyping shop QLabs.

For the Fellows, this variety translated to a rich, wide-ranging and challenging learning experience.  Listening to this semester’s entrepreneurs pitch, it was clear that the past few months have been a rewarding learning experience for them as well.  We’d like to thank all of the companies, panelists and attendees who made the Spring Pitch Event such a success. This has been an exciting year and we’re looking forward to continuing to work to help InSITE and the broader New York startup community reach new heights in the future.

This post was written by Zak Schwarzman, Columbia Business School Class of 2013.

We started our search by asking anyone who would listen “What sort of services should we expect.  How much money will that cost?”  From that point on, we set up meetings with a few lawyers that friends, family, and our school set us up with.  What we realized is that no law firm quotes the same price for the same services.  The majority of the time, they hit you with a massive quote and follow it up with something like, “but we will do it right.”  That statement always sounded a little weird to me.  Do a lot of lawyers do it wrong?  What does that look like?  To be fair though, all the lawyers we spoke to were very generous with their time and up front about what to expect.  We definitely appreciated their help and insights.

After a few weeks of talking to law firms, we set up a conference call with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which is also one of the law firms that sponsors InSITE.  Paul Tumpowsky, the chairman of InSITE, was kind enough to set up the call.  After a few conference calls and then a face-to-face meeting, our team was very impressed.  Not only was the partner, Adam Dinow, both friendly and intelligent, but his associate was also the exact same.  They dealt with our never-ending questions with ease and great patience.  The best part of WSGR is that they have a great track record of helping entrepreneurs.

Getting legal representation early is helpful not only because it protects the founders, but also because it forces the cofounders to have tough discussions as early as humanly possible.  What are our equity splits?  How many shares are we going to issue?  How are we going to vest our shares?  What happens if one of us decides to leave?  When do we plan on hiring additional employees?  Our suggestion to our readers is that you solve all of these problems as early as humanly possible.  Ask a lot of “what if” questions, answer them, get it to a lawyer, and move on.  If you want to have a simple letter agreement amongst founders before you talk to a lawyer, I think that is probably fine too.  However, all the tough questions need to be asked in the beginning.  Leaving those talks to the end will make them even more difficult.

The terms most law firms offer can be negotiated.  This is definitely not always the case, but it is possible.  The bottom line is that you are a startup.  You don’t have cash and you can’t spend a ton of money on legal fees before you even launch your site.  If a law firm gets upset at you for asking to lower their rate, then you don’t want to sign with them anyway.  If they say that there is nothing that they can do about it, then that is fine too … at least you tried.  Similarly, feel free to ask a ton of questions about anything you don’t understand.  Legal speak is not really English so it won’t always be obvious what they are talking about.  Good lawyers understand this and will help you out.  However, please don’t take this as an excuse to ask them everything under the sun.  If it is something you can figure out by googling a term, don’t’ waste their time.  They are, of course, very busy … just like you and me.

Look for startup packages.  Not all law firms offer this, but it can be very helpful to save money in the beginning.  A lot of law firms will defer payments (the amount is negotiable) until funding in exchange for a tiny slice of equity.  If you don’t need to save any money up front, then don’t worry about it.  If you only have $20k to spend, this might be huge for you.

 As always, please feel free to give feedback.  We are still new at this and may be missing something.  If so, we’d love to hear it.

 Best,

Post written by the ThreadMatcher Team (Kevin St. John, Amrish Singh, Alejandro Chahin, NYU MBA’s 2013)

]]> http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/11/finding-legal-help-as-a-start-up/feed/ 0 http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/09/insite-fellow-attends-the-sxsw-festival-in-austin/ http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/09/insite-fellow-attends-the-sxsw-festival-in-austin/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:18:11 +0000 InSITE http://insiteny.org/?p=1943 The average MBA student will use spring break as an opportunity to learn how business is conducted in a different part of the world. In true entrepreneurial fashion, I decided to take a less traditional path with my break. For the last few years I have been interested in attending SXSW, so for my spring break I opted out of an overseas experience and flew down to Austin, Texas.

SXSW is an interactive festival with tons of speakers, panels, parties, and people. There are literally 20-30 different interesting things taking place at any point of the day. I equipped my iPhone with GroupMe to keep up with the people I knew, Highlight to keep up with the people I don’t know, the SXSW Go app to know what panels are taking place, and Twitter to follow what’s trending in the area. Unfortunately, even with my system in place there was still too much to keep up with.

If you’ve read anything about SXSW you’ve probably seen that the best part of the whole festival is the people. Well it’s true enough for me to point out again. You get several thousand people in one place to talk about ideas and innovation and the result is something very special. I ended up going to panels primarily to meet people that had similar interests. My personal interest is in tech startups in the digital media and entertainment space. I was able to connect with startup founders, media executives, and even a guy that ran a startup accelerator with that very focus. I’d imagine people with different interests had the same experience.

It wasn’t all business though. Having the SXSW interactive pass allowed us to eat like kings at the sponsored events by day and get into all the good parties by night. The best party I attended was the Foursquare party where, ironically, I wasn’t able to ‘checkin’ to because my phone died. Carrying a phone charger is an absolute necessity, not having one was was clearly a rookie mistake on my part.

During my time in Austin little was said about the new iPad, the presidential election, or any other ‘news of the day’ topic. Instead we talked about the future, because the city was filled with people that are attempting to create it. The entire experience is truly inspirational for any tech entrepreneur, researcher, or investor. So while I didn’t make it to Budapest or any remote island off the coast of Brazil during my Spring Break, I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be. If you didn’t get the chance to make it to SXSW this year, make sure you plan to go next. I can almost guarantee you’ll find me there.

 Post written by Austin Clements, MBA candidate 2013 NYU Stern School of Business

Blueprint Health, founded by Brad Weinberg and Mathew Farkash, is a healthcare-focused accelerator with a large network of mentors and partners in the space. This winter, they hosted their inaugural class of nine early stage companies headed by physicians, engineers and serial entrepreneurs with expertise in pharmaceuticals, devices, and health information technology among other things. Blueprint health will also host a summer program running from July to October. They host their companies in their expansive 12,000 square foot SoHo loft. Like many other accelerators, Blueprint health offers $20k, an expansive mentorship network, an array of services, and a spot in their aforementioned offices in exchange for a 6% equity stake. In addition to providing space for accelerator companies, Blueprint Health also provides co-working space as well.

There has been a recent surge in interest in accelerators that focus on healthcare.  Blueprint Health is one of three major accelerators focused on health, the other two being Rock Health and Healthbox. Rock Health was arguably the first accelerator of this kind and is located in San Francisco.  However, they have plans to expand to Boston in a partnership with Harvard Medical School. Rock Health hosted their inaugural class in the fall of 2011. Healthbox is located in Chicago and will have its first “Investor Day” on April 6^th of this year.

Blueprint Health hosted nine companies with a strong focus on how information technology can improve healthcare and offer a unique business opportunity. The companies each had a very focused target market.  For example, Symcat is focused on solving the problem of online triage, 5 O’Clock Records is aiming at improving the process of acquiring copies of medical records, and Needl is aiming to power Q&A across apps for healthcare professionals. All of the companies had an open round of investment at the time of the demo day. You can find more information on these companies after the jump or at the Blueprint Health website (www.blueprinthealth.org).

With over 300 people in attendance, the event was incredibly popular. Given that this is the very first event of its kind in NYC, this is a good sign for the future of Blueprint Health and healthcare entrepreneurship in NYC more broadly. The presentations from the companies were consistently impressive.  It was clear that they received excellent guidance in this area. With many investors in the audience, the event was an excellent opportunity for the startups to present their businesses and their vision.

By many standards, Blueprint Health is already a success. It will be interesting to track these nine companies as they grow out of incubation and tackle the challenges of their respective markets. Given that healthcare in the U.S. is a $2 trillion annual market, we should expect that the rise of entrepreneurship in this area is still very nascent. The future looks very bright for innovation in healthcare. New York is poised for development in this area and the growth of accelerators like Blueprint Health is a testament to the vibrancy of New York’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. Given New York’s concentration of bright medical, scientific, business and technical minds, we hope that what we are seeing now with Blueprint Health is only the beginning.

Blueprint Health Inaugural Class:

1. AidIn makes discharge planning easy by creating an online system to manage discharge planning coordination and billing with nursing agencies.
2. 5 O’Clock Records serves as an intermediary between doctors and parties seeking copies of medical records.  It makes it simple for doctors to charge for making and sending copies.
3. iCouch provides a platform for consumers to find therapists, schedule, pay and have video sessions.
4. InquisitHealth is a patient information exchange where patients can directly connect with other patients-like-them.
5. Meddik organizes online health content and conversations on health based on helpfulness and user ratings.
6. Needl powers Q&A on apps designed for healthcare professionals.
7. Patient Communicator is a portal for doctors to schedule appointments online, renew prescriptions and communicate with patients.
8. ProcuredHealth is a subscription-based service that helps hospitals evaluate and share information about medical devices to make better purchasing decisions.
9. Symcat is an online triage service that helps health plans save money by empowering patients to choose the right care at the right place.

Post written by Adler Perotte, MD.

Well, aside from being unafraid to consume most of InSITE fellow Brian Ballan’s delicious hot sauce with our breakfasts, a truly rare opportunity to sit down for an intimate conversation with Mo Koyfman, General Partner of Spark Capital this past Wednesday. After discussing the subtleties and nuances of hot sauce flavor, Mo was kind enough to let us pick his brain on a variety of topics regarding his experiences and forging careers as budding entrepreneurs and early stage investors.  What follows are just a few nuggets of our conversation with Mo:

“Owning” an operational function is invaluable:

Whether it be sales, marketing, or business development the time is now for us to develop specific perspective and skill within a business’s core operational function. Rather than being a generalist, drilling down and developing specific competency that leverages your background, interests, and natural skills will prove to be an asset not only when building early stage businesses, but when adding value to portfolio companies as an investor.

Worrying about current cash compensation is a short-term oriented view:

Working for a startup with some developed scale provides an amazing opportunity to establish core operational/functional experience.  The amount of cash compensation you are/aren’t receiving is mostly irrelevant. Go find a startup and management team you are excited to help support, work hard, and fight for equity based compensation.  Over the longer term the value you derive both in the learning experience and monetarily will far outweigh the potential, near-term disparity in cash compensation.

Mo helped us understand the immense value of not just being open to risk and embracing non-traditional opportunities, but making “smart” decisions that de-risk these opportunities. We would like to thank Mo for his valuable perspective and hope that he enjoyed breakfast, hot sauce and all, as much as we did

Post written by Joseph Rizk (Columbia MBA 2012) and Imraan Ahmed (Columbia MBA 2013)

Led by Josh Miller, Hursh Agrawal, and Cemre Güngör, Branch launched last summer as a “group blogging/debate platform.” Of their time with InSITE, Josh said “When we were heads down, obsessively tinkering with in the details of our product, it was very helpful to have the InSITE folks there to help us understand the ins and outs of the financing process.”

With a lot of initial buzz and some heavy hitting advisors, the Branch team has stayed true to their initial vision as a place for meaningful conversations online. Biz Stone’s announcement of the deal describes Branch as a platform that…

… enables a smart new brand of high quality public discourse. Curated groups of people are invited to engage around issues in which they are knowledgeable. This service holds the promise of a new platform for dialogue on the web—a necessary departure from the monologues we have grown so accustomed to reading online.

For the last several months Branch has been working in San Francisco to prepare for their beta launch at SXSW. They’ll continue working out of the Obvious Corp offices there until they return to New York this summer to take up residence in Betaworks.

Congratulations to Josh, Hursh, and Cemre on their recent success and best of luck as they “turn the Internet’s monologues into dialogues

Post written by Owen Kirshner.

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