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.

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.

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)

He mostly talked about three things: the state of start up’s and VC in the world, the US and NY; the improved relationship between educational institutions and the start up and VC community in NYC; and the areas which he sees as ‘hot’ and interesting right now.

He started off by explaining that start up’s and VC are now happening all over the world: “the city that has grown most quickly in the past 5 years is Beijing. We’ve also seen great activity in India, Western and Eastern Europe and Latin America. So the VC and start up ecosystem is being copied and replicated around the world”.

Similarly, in the US start up’s are now happening throughout the country, not just in NY and in the Bay Area, but also in Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC, Boston and Chicago.  In NYC, “we passed some sort of critical mass a couple of years ago”. He cited that the city government and other big institutions, such as the educational establishments of Columbia University and NYU are paying more attention to the start up community.

Start up’s are recycling its wealth back into the system, nurturing and developing talent, and that’s starting to show many dividends in terms of companies doing well, hiring and growing. In Fred’s view, “the health of the start up community in the world and in NY has never really been better and brighter than today”.

The second topic of Fred’s talk was the relationships between universities and start up’s and VC’s. A few years ago, there was very little connectivity. He emphasized how the InSITE program was ahead of its time in bringing students and the start up and VC community closer together, and that InSITE remains a key agent in bringing this about. Indeed, today students and faculty are starting to commingle with start up’s and venture capitalists and the relationships among them are much more fluid. “People are moving in and out and meeting each other, so the level of relationships that exist between students, faculty, etc. is much more active tan 5 years ago”.

Finally, Fred shared some of his ideas on the areas he finds interesting to focus on today. He highlighted the opportunities brought about by the shift from an industrial era to the information era. Clearly, the way markets and business work is changing radically because of information technology. Information can flow from business to business and even within companies, bringing about fundamental changes. “We like to talk about the fading of the hierarchical model and the growth of the network model, connecting buyers and sellers directly”. We see this in areas such as media, the newspaper industry or classified advertising. We also see this in Google, which has invented new ways of advertising that didn’t exist. “We think these things will happen again and again, so we’re looking at verticals that haven’t been impacted yet by the technological revolution: financial services, education, health care, etc.”.

In the past, people needed to be assembled into companies because of transaction costs around business. But in a world in which those transaction costs are nearly non-existent, the notion that people have to be assembled into firms start to go away. “You already see this in the growth of freelancing and people who want to work for themselves, without necessarily starting a company”. In this regard, Fred mentioned one of the companies in his portfolio WorkMarket, a marketplace for employers and workers to connect, founded by serial entrepreneur Jeff Leventhal.

Fred also mentioned that not enough activity is happening on health care, life sciences, new forms of energy, and even the intersections between hardware, software and these areas. “There is a lot of innovation that could be brought to life sciences, urban sciences and other growth sectors. That’s one area that is underinvested in globally and here in NY”. 50 years ago, less than 50% of VC dollars went to information technology and around 30% to life sciences. Today IT is getting 60% or 70% and life sciences less than 20%. So there has been a big shift. There are many reasons that explain this: less capital requirements, quicker get to revenue timeframes, better returns, quicker opportunities to exit and so on. Despite this, Fred mentioned we need to think of ways to make life sciences more capital-efficient.

Another area of interest was Wellness. “The idea of keeping yourself well rather than focusing on what happens when you’re sick… The industry has many gatekeepers and entrenched interests, so we’re interested in areas that are outside of that… One thing that’s been consistent in Union Square Ventures is that instead of investing in software that makes the existing establishment and institutions better, we have tended to want to compete with those businesses… When we went into education, we looked into home schooling, continuing education, and so on. Areas that were more entrepreneurial and less controlled by big institutions. New models as opposed to established ones”

Mobile payments was another area of focus. “Money is just information, just some bits in a wire. It doesn’t’ make sense to pay $3 for those transactions”. He cited Dwolla, another of the companies in his portfolio. “What we liked about Dwolla is that they are trying to make money transfers free. How are they going to make money then? The idea is that if you make money transfers free and you have a system that works well, so that you’ve a lot of people and businesses using the system, there are a lot of value-added services that you can provide around it. We liked Dwolla because they want to change the game in this industry”.

He warned “it’s easy to get caught up when you see companies like Facebook going public and everyone is obsessed with that. You’ve to remember that Facebook got started 8 years ago, and that starting a company that looks like Facebook today is not necessarily the right thing to do. It was clearly the right thing to do 8 years ago, maybe even 4 years ago, but not the right thing to do today. So we force ourselves to think not what’s hot today, but how the world is going to look like 10 years from now. And that leads us to new investments”.

It seems to be a strategy that has worked very well for Fred and his team. And we, at InSITE, most definitely hope to learn from it. We will keep reading his blog and look forward to having him give our InSITE’s ‘State of the Union’ talk next year.

This post was written by Lila Pla Alemany, Class of 2013 at Columbia Business School.

Youtube Video of Fred Wilson’s Insite talk

It is as important for athletes to win championships as it is important for entrepreneurs to hit homerun exits fortheir companies; but value cannot be placed on the bottom line alone. Value is created by the determined people putting their heart and soul into making their dreams come true.

InSITE’s end of the semester event, which was held last Friday, truly embodied this spirit. It was a unique opportunity to reflect back on the work that has been done throughout the past months, to be inspired by entrepreneurs who are trying to improve our lives in many different ways, to hear about new, innovative ideas and emerging technologies, to learn from the other fellows, and to absorb insights from a distinguished panel of venture capitalists.

No two InSITE teams had the same experiences or takeaways from their work with these young startups; various markets, stages, competitive advantage, business needs, and most importantly – people, kept Friday’s event exciting throughout the entire morning. These are the companies InSITE fellows worked with throughout the semester:

BestVendor is a free online resource that helps professionals find the best “work apps” through social recommendations. InSITE fellows assisted with a wide range of business aspects – financial modeling, recommendation engines, viral exposure, etc.
Zeel is a marketplace to find and book appointments with qualified heath & wellness providers. Already serving thousands of customers, Zeel’s goal is to make American people happier.
The Geno.me is a startup striving to improve scientists’ ability to research and innovate in genomics. The company’s goal is to help accelerating genomics research, and it received some excellent suggestions from our panel on how to target a larger market.
The Runthrough is a platform that facilitates communication and discovery between the fashion industry’s most influential editors, stylists, and designers. The “W-Magazine Mafia” worked closely with InSITE fellows to perfect their pitch and mission of revolutionizing the fashion industry.
Framey provides the easiest way to record video on any website. InSITE fellows assisted with a full market segmentation and pricing analysis.
bre.ad is a word-of-mouth marketing platform for celebrities, brands and charities thatoffers a technology to amplify its customers’ exposure on Facebook and Twitter.
Roundtable is a platform for hosting and publishing public conversations online. The company’s mission is to bring dialogues to the monologue that is the Internet.

The companies gave their pitches to a wonderful panel that included Kirill Sheynkman (Managing Director, RTP Ventures), David Teten (Partner, ff Venture Capital), Bob Greene (Managing Partner, Contour Venture Partners), and David Lerner (Director of Venture Labs, Columbia University Tech Ventures). This journey would not have been complete without our panelists’ time and insightful comments.

Aside from the traditional work with the startups, InSITE fellows have also been involved in several special projects in biotech and cleantech, and in a new initiative named InSITE Research. Under InSITE Research, a pair of fellows dives into a specific industry or investment thesis – such as the NYC incubators and angels scene, or the mobile payments investment research that was presented on Friday (and will be available as a white paper in thefuture). We also heard a quick recap of the successful Sony Always Be Closing event held last month, where promising NYC startups pitched directly to Sony executives in order to provide a solution to Sony’s business development and technology needs.

Fellow Elliott Robinson mentioned at the beginning of the semester on how humbling the venture capital industry is, since you are constantly surrounded with extremely talented, smart, experienced, visionary entrepreneurs that inevitably fail (a lot). Friday’s event provided an opportunity to celebrate our companies’ dedication and courage to dare to challenge the status-quo, dare to create something that has not been done before, and dare to succeed. It was also an opportunity to acknowledge the efforts of InSITE fellows, who – in Sean Weinstock’s words – are “just kids with passion”, and InSITE has helped us to develop the set of tools to make this passion a reality.

This post was written by Maya Mandel, Columbia Business School Class of 2013 and Arun Batra, an Applied Physics PhD student at Columbia Class of 2015.

“What do you mean we’re out of coffee?” : The 8:30 am start dampened neither enthusiasm nor immaculate dress sense.

All Hands on Deck: BestVendor CEO Jeff Gisea introduces the InSITE team that worked with him this semester.

Our Illustrious Panel (Left to Right): Kirill Sheynkman, David Teten, Bob Greene, and David Lerner.

Not So Strictly Business: Ayo Omojola showcasing a demo of WanderPlayer, one of the startups that participated in the Sony ABC event, and turns a smartphone into a game controller so one can play games in any screen. Mandy Teng, COO of The Runthrough, is Mario.

One of the most interesting aspects of our discussion centered around how David came to be one the figures in NYC’s startup ecosystem and the MD of TechStars NYC. In brief, David met David Cohen and initially suggested others for the role, but eventually found himself in a very atypical sort of interview. David essentially spent some time with the team in the Boulder office until it was clear that he should be on board.

Possibly the most surprising thing we learned about David is how much he likes to keep to himself. Given David’s presence in NYC and how engaged he was in our breakfast you would be hard pressed to identify an introvert in him. But David assured us that it takes effort for him to meet new people.

One thing that was clear from our meeting is that David is making his mark on the NYC startup ecosystem.

Ben, Victoria, Joe, Brian, and I would like to thank David again for taking the time out of his schedule to meet with us.

Adler Perotte, MD
Senior InSITE fellow

Jim highlighted the increase in the volume of early stage investing in his discussion, describing the “barbell” shape of the investment market: lots of early-stage activity and lots of growth equity, leaving a nice area of opportunity for RRE in between. He remarked that RRE helped spur the rise of angel stage investing in New York, but that the explosion of interest has been even greater than they imagined. He also gave us a word of caution: starting a startup now is easier then ever because of low capex, but starting a business is harder because of talent. He advised those interested in becoming entrepreneurs, especially those thinking about starting up right after the MBA program, to gain valuable insight by first working at a startup.

He also spoke about his outlook on investing in the future. In terms of where there is opportunity now, he still sees many gaps in areas that are yet to be effectively moved online. For example, there are no dominant brands in health and wellness or self-help online, though these areas have thriving offline markets. In the future, due to long cycle times for technology adoptions (he thinks we have ~15 years left in the current 50 year macro cycle), he thinks “startup” will mean nanotech, genomics etc. He also sees startups on the rise in places like China and Brazil and has explored investments in the Chinese market. Like any investor, he seeks out interesting and growing markets. However, his approach to investing, no matter how big the opportunity, is to never be the sheep.

Thanks Jim!

This post was written by Marianna Zaslavsky, Columbia Business School Class of 2013.

In case you’re wondering, the answer to the first question is 5 am! I’ll leave it as an intellectual exercise for the reader to guess why.

The InSITE Leadership Breakfast series is a biweekly event designed to give InSITE fellows the chance to interact with and learn from a leader of the NYC Startup Community. Past leaders have included Steve Martocci, Chris Dixon and David Tisch.

At the most recent Leadership Breakfast with Andy, he talked about his new job as a partner at USV, the firm’s highly successful investment thesis (and the importance of a VC firm to stick to their first principles), and some of USV’s recent investments, including DuckDuckGo (http://duckduckgo.com/) and Codecademy (http://codecademy.com/).

One of the things that really appealed to me was Andy’s philosophy on what he calls “Disruptive Innovation” as a first principle for entrepreneurship. The traditional approach has been to take an old world (offline) phenomenon, copy it and bring it online. However, this does not always cause “disruption” and lead to success. Rather a disruptive idea is one that is radical enough to change the way business is done and redefine an entire industry. For example: Until recently, online advertising had been about replacing, what we have in the offline world (magazines/newspapers) and getting it online in the form of display advertising (think DoubleClick or popup banners). However, what truly disrupted this approach was Google Ads, which took the content displayed on the page and presented relevant text-ads. Not only did this enhance the user experience, but also transformed the traditional model of advertising. Andy hinted that there was a high possibility of such disruptions coming from products being built on top of existing major platforms (such as Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter).

Abe, Joe, Brian, Austin and Amrish would like to thank Andy for taking the time to meet with them and wish him good luck on his new role at USV. Thanks Andy!

- Amrish Singh (@amrish), InSITE Fellow and NYU Stern MBA 2013

Andy Weissman is a partner at Union Square Ventures. Andy began his career in the Internet at AOL in the mid-90s, then managed a series of venture funds with Dawntreader Ventures. In 2007 he co-founded betaworks, which both created and invested in social, real-time applications and services. Andy was born in New York City and has a BA from Wesleyan University and a JD from Georgetown.
Source: http://content.usv.com/pages/andy-weissman