The 30 Hour HBS NY VC Trek: suits, standing desks and unreal chocolates
Along with a couple startup/VC obsessed HBS students, I recently visited some of New York’s VC funds to learn more about post-MBA careers in venture capital, NY venture capital ecosystem, and firm-specific investing philosophy. In this post, I wrote about what stuck with me, what I learned and what I think could be useful for other VC/Startup obsessed people. I skipped details that can be read or inferred from the funds’ websites or the Internet. I would like to begin by thanking all the VCs below who took time to meet us, opened up their experience to us and candidly answered our...
Read MoreSome of NY’s hottest startups present at InSITE’s semi-annual pitch event
Last Friday, Novemeber 30, over 120 people joined inSITE fellows in celebrating the work that they’ve done this Fall semester at the InSITE’s Semi-Annual Final Pitch Event ‘InSITE Connect’ at Cooley LLP’s offices. The event kicked off with some announcements by InSITE’s chairman Paul Tumpowsky. He revealed that InSITE is expanding outside of the city to Boston, Stanford and Washingdon DC, thanked all our partners and sponsors and listed some of the great achievements of InSITE alumni (more of this in a future post!). Following Paul, founders and CEO’s of some of...
Read MoreInSITE Fellows Looking Into the Future at TEDxSilliconAlley
Disclosure: if you are not into futuristic type themes (articial intelligence, etc) skip to “practical takeawys“. Few InSITE Fellows got a sneak peak into the future at the TEDxSilliconAlley event themed “The Rise of the Machines” this past Monday, December 3, 2012. The theme of many of the talks were about turning the imagined “what if” questions (What if we had flying robots that followed us around? What if we could fix our broken coffee maker by 3D printing a part in our home without going to a hardware store? Wjat of we could extend our intelligence? What if...
Read MoreInSITE Breakfast Series: Jake Furst – Business Development, Foursquare
On November 5th, InSITE fellows Brian Galgay, Josh Goldman, Marije Van Mens, Yusuf Roso, and I had breakfast with Jake Furst, business development guru at Foursquare. After a quick intro discussing our individual passions, Jake gave us a unique perspective as one of Foursquare’s early non-technical employees as the company grew from 15 to 150 employees. He’s a Columbia MBA and has really carved a position for himself in one of the fastest growing tech companies in NYC. We talked about an MBA’s role in a startup, Foursquare’s amazing growth, and of course,...
Read MoreInSITE Team Project Update: Improving the State of Education with TeachBoost
When I watched the final presentations in the InSITE mentoring selection process I was really excited about a lot of startups, but one company in particular really grabbed a hold of me: TeachBoost. The team crushed it on their pitch, clearly identifying a real problem with a sizable market opportunity — and more importantly how their solution can improve education. This semester a lucky few InSITE fellows were able to help Teachboost think about and prepare for some upcoming challenges. What is TeachBoost? Schools use TeachBoost every day to conduct classroom observations and...
Read MoreInSITE Team Project Update: ReadrBoard – Love it, Hate it, ew
Over the past few weeks, InSITE fellows Christina Yugai, David Benhamou, Tom Hsu, Eric Rinder, and Robert Sanchez had the privilege of working with ReadrBoard, a startup that aims to revolutionize online comments and interactions. The InSITE Fellows joined Porter Bayne and Eric Chaves of ReadrBoard to refine the company’s monetization strategy and to develop a pitch deck for its fundraising round. The last few weeks have been spent diving deep into the content publishing marketplace, looking for purchasing patterns, advertising prices, and competitiors. The ReadrBoard team developed a...
Read More