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).

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/2012/04/11/finding-legal-help-as-a-start-up/ http://insiteny.org/media/2012/04/11/finding-legal-help-as-a-start-up/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:50:00 +0000 InSITE http://insiteny.org/?p=1948 If you are like me, the only thing you know about the law is that you should plead the fifth when you did something wrong and don’t want to admit it … not that I’ve ever done anything wrong though .  When my team and I began creating ThreadMatcher, we realized that this was something we would be investing all of our time to.  In order to get it started right, we knew that we needed legal help.  (DO NOT get a lawyer unless you are going to follow through with your idea).  Unfortunately, neither of my cofounders knew a ton about the law either.

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

I wrote up a small business plan, started researching the industry, and did a ton of customer development.  As I talked to potential users, my idea naturally started to shift.  I spoke to fashion experts and social media experts.  I created surveys, talked to friends, and even stopped students coming out of fashion schools to talk about how they would use my potential site.  As I continued to receive positive feedback, I started to feel as if I had a good chance of building something that people will find true value in.  This entire process took about three to four months.  I was moving rather quickly and then it stopped abruptly.  I needed at least one cofounder, especially one with a technical background.  I had a finance and sales background so I was confident in doing the financials, marketing, and business development.  However, without a product to market, I had nothing.

For the first two months, I was constantly asking friends if they knew anyone with a technical background.  I was living in San Francisco at the time so you would think that this wouldn’t be so difficult.  I was wrong.  I eventually found a few friends that knew someone with technical capabilities, but they always said that their contact was in the middle of a project.  I started to feel helpless.  Then, in a matter of a three weeks, I had a few people with the right background who all of the sudden wanted to help.  They weren’t direct friends, but they were friends of friends and that was good enough for me.

Enter the next problem: Fit.  When you decide to start a company, you are really deciding who you want to spend all day and night with for the next x amount of years.  While the contacts that I had made were very nice, something told me that it wasn’t going to work out.  Some contacts were flakey and wouldn’t call me back.  That made me worry about getting in touch with them in the future.  Other contacts demanded a certain equity stake and told me that they would work on their own schedule.  The funniest part about this problem is that I didn’t care about equity.  I wanted to give him 50% and he was demanding less than that.  However, I felt that the demanding nature of the claim started us off on the wrong foot … so I kept waiting … waiting for someone that I could partner with (as equals) in a business.

After entering business school at NYU Stern, I was told of a program called InSITE, a mentorship program of NYU and Columbia students who support entrepreneurs in the development of their business.  At this stage of my life, I wasn’t sure if I was going to start my company first or join a startup to get a better understanding of how startups operate.  I joined InSITE because I thought it would help with the latter.  It turns out that it helped both.  After working for QLabs in the first semester of my first year, I started hanging out with two of my good friends in the program, Amrish Singh and Alejandro Chahin.  Amrish is an avid technologist and previously published research papers in machine learning, written a book chapter on social aspects of information organization, and founded Testmojo.com.  Alejandro is a smart jack-of-all-trades guy who previously worked as a Project Manager at Intermoda, an apparel production and wholesale firm.   Without knowing it, I had made good friends with the perfect cofounders.  I was creating a tech company based on fashion and I had just found a tech guy and an apparel guy who I knew I could spend hours on end with creating this site.  This was the day ThreadMatcher began.

InSITE has been the best part of going to business school.  While I am learning a ton at Stern, meeting entrepreneurial minded people and working on startups at InSITE has been the most rewarding part of my time in NYC.  This semester, Amrish, Alejandro, and myself will be starting ThreadMatcher as our project.  In return, we will be blogging about our experience.  Hopefully, you will learn from our successes and failures as we keep you up to date.  Please feel free to comment on any of our posts.

 Post written by Kevin St. John (NYU MBA 2013) and founder of ThreadMatcher.

]]> http://insiteny.org/media/2012/03/25/finding-the-right-cofounders/feed/ 0 http://insiteny.org/media/2012/03/19/insite-fellow-victoria-cheng-awarded-prestigious-kauffman-fellowship/ http://insiteny.org/media/2012/03/19/insite-fellow-victoria-cheng-awarded-prestigious-kauffman-fellowship/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:58:44 +0000 InSITE http://insiteny.org/?p=1879 Victoria Cheng, an InSITE Fellow and MBA student at Columbia Business School, has recently been selected to be part of the ‘Kauffman Fellows Program’ as a Kauffman Finalist, in a two-year program granted by the Center for Venture Education that aims to educate, develop and network emerging leaders in the venture capital industry and to cultivate new high-technology, high-growth and high-impact companies.  Each year, 30 people are chosen worldwide to be part of this fellowship and selection signals membership among an elite cadre of the world’s most promising venture investors.

Victoria has been a stellar fellow at InSITE (she has served as VP of Operations and AVP of Sourcing) and is passionate about education around entrepreneurship and the start-up ecosystem in New York.  She has worked with early stage companies from Incubation (SeedStart Incubator) to Seed (NYC Seed) to Early Stage (Foundation Capital) to Growth Equity (Investor Growth Capital).

In addition to being a VP at InSITE, Victoria also runs the Venture Capital initiatives for the Private Equity and Venture Capital Organization at Columbia Business School, where she will graduate in May 2012.  As she says, “I love investing in and working with entrepreneurs to create products that solve existing problems or change the way things are done today for the better.  InSITE played a large role in sparking my passion for working with early stage companies.”

The Kauffman Fellows receive professional mentorship, access to a network of Kauffman Fellows around the world, and an extensive curriculum to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in the venture capital industry. The educational curriculum includes classroom time, conferences, an international symposium and a customized leadership program. To date, Kauffman Fellows have made $6 billion in venture capital investments, sparking growth in hundreds of new enterprises, $15 billion in annually recurring revenues, and the creation of 50,000 jobs. Past Kauffman Fellows have gone on to become Partners and Founders at some of the world’s most well known venture capital firms such as NEA, USVP, Venrock, Kleiner Perkins, and DFJ.

In Victoria’s words “I think both InSITE and Kauffman are outstanding programs that are striving to expand the entrepreneurial community by educating and bringing together really talented individuals who are passionate about innovation.  It is an honor to have been selected.  I believe the Kauffman program would further guide me to becoming an investor and mentor to the companies that I work with.”
Kauffman Fellowship website: http://www.kauffmanfellows.org/

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

You can read the full guide below or in his blog.

Ben has worked in strategy, corporate development and investment banking, and is currently working on a venture in the health and wellness space that is “like LearnVest for fitness and wellness”. In his words, “I can’t say enough about how important InSITE has been for me.  I came back to Stern and knew I wanted to do either VC or work with tech startups, and InSITE did more to make that a reality than anything else I’ve done”.

Here Ben’s tips:

NYU, New York City, and business school in general is becoming a better place to launch into the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Here is Ben’s ‘cheat sheet’ for how to take full advantage of the opportunities that the city offers, both for students at Stern and other business schools and aspiring entrepreneurs in general. Ben’s hope is that this list makes the process more efficient for others. It is not a comprehensive list, so check out Ben’s blog for updates.

Summer Reading:

Mandatory

Books

• The Lean Startup
• The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development
• Business Model Generation

Blogs:

• AVC
• Both Sides of the Table

Websites:

• Hacker News, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal (still need to understand all business trends), ReadWriteWeb

For Non-Technical People

• How the Internet Works
• W3 Schools (website)
• Lynda.com (website, taught myself Illustrator in 1.5 days)
• Codecademy (do at least some of the levels)

Especially for the Aspiring VCs

• Venture Deals

Optional

Books

• Four Steps to the Epiphany
• The Art of the Start
• Getting to Plan B
• Little Bets
• The Entrepreneurial Venture (classic with some good stuff for those new to entrepreneurship, but buy it used because there’s some useless stuff too)

For Non-Technical People

• RailsTutorial.org (lock yourself in a room for 40 hours and learn Ruby on Rails like Nate Westheimer and my good buddy Nate Berkopec)

Other blogs I like:

• Ben Horowitz, Chris Dixon, Vinicius Vacanti, Bill Gurley, Jared Hecht, MG Siegler

Other websites if you have time:

• The Economist (no better way to come up with business opportunities than to understand trends globally)

• Industry-specific sites depending on your areas of entrepreneurial interest (e.g., I read Paid Content because I care about media)

People to Follow on Twitter:

• Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, Eric Ries, Vinicius Vacanti, Alex Osterwalder, Peter Sims, Hiten Shah, Steve Case, Chris Dixon, Eric Hippeau, Roger Ehrenberg, All Things D, Brad Feld, PandoDaily, Mike Lazerow, MG Siegler, Mike Arrington, David Tisch, Patrick Vlaskovits, John Borthwick, Nate Westheimer, NYU Entrepreneur, Frank Rimalovski (there are probably 25 additional NYC-based people that could be on this list, I just think this is a good mix)

Newsletters to sign up for:

• Charlie O’Donnell
• Garys Guide
• General Assembly
• PEHub
• Term Sheet from Fortune
• Create Google News alerts for your verticals of interest

Professors to know at NYU Stern:

• Evan Korth (computer science professor, co-runs HackNY)
• Glenn Okun (teaches a bunch of the Stern MBA entrepreneurial classes)
• Hilary Gosher (teaching a night class, Partner at IVP, awesome)
• Larry Lenihan (teaches “Ready, Fire, Aim” for undergrads, MD of FirstMark Capital, great NYU friend)
• Cynthia Franklin (adjunct professor, helps run the Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship)
• Jeffrey Carr (Executive Director of the Berkeley Center, teaches several courses focused on entrepreneurial marketing)
• Norman White (information science professor at Stern, teaches a web and mobile application development course, has servers students can use)
• Adam Penenberg (if you’re interested in media)
• ITP professors (I could have done better here)
• NYU-Poly (I really could have done better here)

Other people to meet in NYC:

• Frank Rimalovski (runs NYU Innovation Venture Fund)
• Jason Finger (founder of Seamless, super super smart and nice guy)
• David Tisch (you should know who he is)
• Ryan Jacoby (new NYU EIR, just met him, awesome)
• Rob Fassino (the other NYU EIR, co-Founded XO group, probably awesome)
• Trevor Owens (started Lean Startup Machine, kick-started entrepreneurship at NYU for undergraduates before leaving school, works out of Dogpatch)
• Dawn Barber (founder of NYTM)
• Owen Davis (always around NYU events, runs NYC Seed)
• Brian Cohen (good friend of NYU, Vice Chairman of NY Angels)

Events to go to in NYC:

• New York Tech Meetup
• Every single free talk from real entrepreneurs at Stern
• Demo days for every incubator and accelerator you can get into (many take place at General Assembly)
• ITP Winter and Spring Shows
• At least 1 or 2 relevant Meetups in verticals you care about a month
• Lean Startup Machine (at least once go to the New York program, contact @to2 for details and potential student discount)
• HackNY Hackathon
• Tech@NYU DemoDays / Hackdays

Places to hang out:

• Dogpatch Labs
• Courant
• Poly Incubator
• General Assembly
• Varick Incubator
• AOL Ventures (if you can figure out a reason you belong there, the office is awesome)
• Ace Hotel Lobby (this may not be where anyone goes anymore, I’ve never actually been there, wince)

Groups to join at NYU Stern:

• TANG
• EEX
• Potentially a club that is in a vertical of interest to you
• LABA (for the parties)
• Tech@NYU
• ACM (if you write code)

Classes at NYU Stern:

• Foundations of Entrepreneurship
• Managing Growing Companies
• Entrepreneurship in the New Economy
• Designing and Developing Web and Mobile Applications
• Competitive Strategy in the Marketplace
• Brand Strategy
• Accounting (multiple accounting classes if possible)
• Venture Financing
• Greg Coleman class if he teaches again

Semester 1:

• Email second year MBAs who have started companies or are involved in entrepreneurship groups, ask them for advice on all the things above (in case they have other suggestions).
• Apply for InSITE, a Fellowship program for graduate school students interested in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and technology.  Not easy to get accepted (still not sure what they were thinking) but one of the best things I’ve done.  Well worth the time and effort.
• Meet with recent grads working at startups in NYC for coffee, ask them about what they did at Stern, know more about their companies than 99% of people out there, make good suggestions.
• Start hitting all the events listed above.
• Learn the basics of writing code and treat it as an extra and more important class.  You don’t need to be fluent, but you need to speak the language.
• Download Evernote and start storing interesting articles, ideas, and other stuff in one place.  Go back and read it from time to time.

Semester 2:

• Look at the recently funded companies from investors like Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, IA Ventures, RRE, etc. across the first semester.  Figure out the one with the most potential (in your opinion, not according to TechCrunch).  Think of 3-4 ways you can add immediate value to their business and aggressively pursue an unpaid internship for the semester.  (When I was a first year this company was GroupMe, and David Lee told me so.  Whoops, should have done this…)
• Keep up the networking like crazy.  Skip class if you have to, but get out and meet people in NYC tech.
• Pick a few verticals or types of businesses you think are interesting and do some real deep dives.  You can afford to spend time knowing more about certain areas than most of the pundits and bloggers that never get more than Twitter or blog-level deep on this stuff.  Go really deep.  (Forthcoming blog post on this.)
• Go to SXSW or San Francisco.  Or both.  Set up some casual coffee chats with NYU alumni and just people from cool companies.  Go out on the town.

Summer:

• I’d like to say take a startup internship if you can get it.  But sometimes you need to pay the rent.  I worked in TMT banking.  Personal decision and depends on whether you can find a paid internship in tech and how many fixed expenses you have (FYI: East Village can be expensive…).  Google and other big tech companies have internships that are paid though.

Semester 3:

• Try to start a business.  At least test some potential business ideas.  (You can also start this in year 1).  Business school offers time and access to unique resources.  No better time to try to launch a venture.  Playing the student card when conducting research goes a long way.
• Enter the business plan competition.  Don’t let it get in the way of real progress, but throw your hat in the ring.  $75k with zero dilution can be worth the time if it doesn’t hinder things you would do anyway.
• Good tools for the effort: GoMockingbird or Balsamiq, Unbounce, monthly subscriptions to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (30 day free trials), free survey software from Qualtrics from Stern Apps, the NYU business resource library, and classmates (for ideation partners, survey respondents when appropriate, and partners).
• Try to TA an entrepreneurial class for undergraduates.  You will meet some great young entrepreneurs.  One of my better decisions.

Semester 4:

• Don’t freak out because you don’t have a job lined up.

You can learn more about Ben here: http://linkd.in/poXOA1

And follow him on Twitter here: http://bit.ly/zkuxsa

Post written by Ben Sesser (MBA Stern NYU) and Lila Pla Alemany (MBA Columbia Business School).

Joelle continues to highlight InSITE as the most beneficial extracurricular activity she undertook during business school. Joelle has leveraged the hands on work experience with startups provided by InSITE to the benefit of her corporate development roles. She is especially grateful for the robust InSITE community of entrepreneurs and VCs that she is able to call on to help source deals and connect with industry thought leaders.