Pivotal Labs, in collaboration with VentureArchetypes (www.venturearchetypes.com), hosted an entrepreneur panel discussion on October 23, 2007.
(For the impatient, you can jump to the end for podcast links of the event.)
The event topic was:
You’ve Launched, Now What?
Managing the Reality of Life After Launch
We had four fantastic panelists:
- Chris Law is co-founder and VP Product of Aggregate Knowledge, a leader in the new field of “collective discovery” that creates automated behavior recommendations for websites. Since starting up in 2006, AK has raised $25m from Kleiner Perkins, DAG, and First Round Capital.
- Jeremy Verba is CEO of Piczo, a leading online site for teenagers that has grown virally to 10 million unique visitors generating 2 billion views a month. The company has raised $18m over three rounds from Sierra, Catamount, Mangrove, and USVP.
- Prashant Shah is Managing Director at Hummer Winblad, the first venture capital fund to invest exclusively in software companies. HW has just closed a new fund with $225m of new “dry powder” to invest. At HW, Prashant is seeking investments on the business side of the web/software market.
- Mark Fernandes is Managing Director at Sierra Ventures, which invests broadly across communications, software, and Internet related companies. Mark’s focus at Sierra is on consumer Internet and infrastructure software.
The audience were primarily entrepreneurs and a few investors. A few comments we received include:
“As an entrepreneur at SpongeFish, an early stage consumer Internet startup, this was a highly informative event for entrepreneurs that provided interesting perspective from seasoned Internet execs and VCs. The nice thing about this event was the open nature of the discussions where execs, VCs, and entrepreneurs had a very open forum discussing key issues facing entrepreneurs at early stage startups. Having the partners from several venture firms on hand for off the record perspective was also really valuable.”
–Michael Neril, CEO and Founder, SpongeFish (www.spongefish.com)
Thanks
We’d like to thank our panelists; they had great insights and were incredibly down-to-earth. We’d also like to thank our audience members. Besides their great questions, their participation in the pre/post panel discussions and mingling made it a wonderful night.
What’s Next?
We are planning to host more of these events. We’d love to hear your feedback or comments.
Podcast and Photos
The evening’s podcast is available in two parts: the panel discussion and the audience Q&A.
- Panel Discussion
- Audience Question and Answer:
Note: Due to microphone proximity, some audience questions were inaudible. The audio for these brief sections was omitted for the sake of continuity. In most cases, our moderator repeated these questions or hopefully the response will provide enough context for the original question. - Photos on Flickr
