Startup Grind Atlanta Hosts Catherine & Christopher SKETCH’D (SKETCH’D)

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Saturday, 29 June

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Teenagers Catherine Van Orden and Christopher Jones will be sitting down with Startup Grind Atlanta June 29th to talk about their new app SKETCH’D. The Long time friends 19 year old Christopher and 15 year old Catherine share an extensive background in tech. Put these two brilliant minds together and you have the next big app in image manipulation SKETCH’D. The app enables users to draw anything they would like with precision, animate it instantly with their fingers, and share with their friends and family as a video. The user can also take a photo, turn it into a drawing and make the drawing a video.  What makes this app unique is the ability to streamline the process of animating a drawing to create a brand new image. The user simply selects a certain number of animation points (similar to large gaming studio animation methods), drag the points onto certain parts of the drawing, and move them around. The app records the motion and then turns it into a video. The video can then be shared inside the Sketch’d network and on other social networks such as Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Anyone who loves the app Draw Something, Instagram, or Vine will love Sketch’d. Sketch’d is in line to become the latest addictive app you just cant keep your hands off.

SKETCH’D will be launching June 25th on Kickstarter.

 

A Night In LA With Mark Suster

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sgmsusterWednesday night at Cross Campus, Startup Grind welcomed Mark Suster to his home turf of Los Angeles for a reprisal of his role as an awesome speaker at Startup Grind Conference.It was our most successful LA event ever, with 120 people in attendance filling up Cross Campus to standing room only. In this wrap-up you’ll read about what happened, what our members thought, where you can get THE VIDEO(at the bottom), and some exciting announcements.

Mark shared the story of his formative years as a Economics guy who wanted to become a Tech guy, who wanted to become a General Partner. The epic spanned across the United States, France, and back again to Los Angeles where Mark has made his ‘mark’ on our communtiy forever. It was all possible because whatever Mark wanted to be, that’s what he told people he was, and then he did what that guy would do so that others could see him that way. It’s called making your own Brand. Everyone will want to give you a simple brand, Mark illustrated, so brand yourself first to get where you want to go. Speckled with dozens of hilarious and insightful stories spanning numerous topics, it was a valuable and delightfully intimate evening. Read more →

Startup Grind Washington DC Hosts Sanju Bansal (cofounder of MicroStrategy)

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Tuesday, 6 August

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Founded in 1989 by Michael J. Saylor and Sanju K. Bansal, MicroStrategy develops and sells business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services for some of the top Fortune 500 companies and technology companies in the world including Facebook, eBay, and Yahoo.  MicroStrategy was one of the first companies to pioneer data-driven enterprises with Business Intelligence and now is enhancing Big Data capabilities with its army of data scientists.  It is a public traded company on the NASDAQ: MSTR with almost $600 million in revenues with 3,200 employees worldwide.  Mr. Bansal received an S.B. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Computer Science from The Johns Hopkins University.

Hear this incredible rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches story from the perspective of this famous and humble DC area founder.  Also, we will talk about his insights to Big Data in the enterprises, social media, and mobile.

 

 

Gabriel Weinberg Provides Instant Answers: Passion, Ambition & Perseverance

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“PEOPLE WITH BIG VISIONS WHO BOOTSTRAP BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO AND THEN SLOWLY DRAW PEOPLE INTO THEIR VISION.”  ~ Gabe Weinberg, in response to what type of entrepreneurs he admires most.

Another 50+ Philly entrepreneurs left inspired after round two of Startup Grind PHL.  Gabriel Weinberg, Founder of anonymous and instant answer search engine DuckDuckGo, dished out his transparent lessons learned as a tech startup founder, angel investor, boot-strapper, and oh yeah, family man.  That’s right – Gabe spent his first two years launching DuckDuckGo while being a stay at home father with his son.  Mad respect!

On Wednesday June 5th, Startup Grind Philadelphia welcomed Gabriel Weinberg in front of another packed-house at Benjamin’s Desk.  Despite a massive building collapse in Center City earlier that day, entrepreneurs still showed up in droves to hear from a founder who’s failed, exited, bootstrapped, raised venture capital, angel invested, and still spends time with the family! Read more →

Startup Grind New York City Hosts Esther Dyson (EDventure Holdings)

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Thursday, 18 July

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Esther Dyson of EDventure Holdings is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space.

Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. Her board seats include 23andMe, Airship Ventures, Boxbe, Voxiva, Eventful, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect, Yandex (Russia)…and WPP Group (not a start-up). Some of her other direct IT investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), BrightMail (sold to Symantec), Orbitz (sold to Cendant), Medstory and Powerset (both sold to Microsoft), Plazes (sold to Nokia), Tacit (sold to Oracle), BlogAds, BrightHouse, ChoiceStream, Dopplr, Dotomi, Linkstorm, Mashery, Organized Wisdom, Ovusoft, PatientsLikeMe, Resilient,Technorati, ThingD, Vizu.com and Zedo. Indirectly, she is an investor in Amee.cc and Wesabe.

Hear her speak of innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space. She’s considered to be one of the most influential female investors in the startup world today.  You don’t want to miss this fireside chat!

Twitter @edyson

The Kimball Thomas´ story: from pooltables.com to baby.com.br

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O primeiro evento do Startup Grind em São Paulo, não poderia ser melhor! O “chapter” teve o privilégio de receber Kimball Thomas, um dos líderes na revolução de e-commerces no Brasil. O público presente se impressionou pelo que Kimball alcançou em um curto período de tempo. Em 2004 ele fundoupooltables.com, website que se tornou uma das maiores lojas de mesas de bilhar nos Estados Unidos. Em 2010 ele completou seu MBA em Harvard. Em 2011 ele fundou baby.com.br, um dos maiores e-commerces brasileiros.

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Startup Grind Bangalore Hosts Hari Karunanidhi (Interview Street & Hacker Rank)

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Friday, 14 June

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We have invited Hari Karunanidhi who is co-founder of Interview Street and Hackers Rank.

Right of out college Hari knew a regular day job is not for him, and so he started his first company with his friend. Soon after they realized whatever they were doing was not going great. After talking to customers, they realize what could be done and then new Interview Street was born. With Facebook, Amazon, Quora and Microsoft as their clients they are doing pretty good and have started another company called Hacker Rack.

Hari is going to talk about his experiences and his daily struggles. We will also discuss things which worked and  didn’t work for him in past. A little about his companies:

Interview Street is best way to hire programmers and you choose your hires with code challenges.

Hacker Rank is a platform for hackers to solve fun programming challenges, across multiple domains of computer science, in a language of their choice and learning opportunities as they go.

Both of the companies are backed by multiple VC’s and angel investors.

Startup Grind Vancouver Hosts Boris Wertz (version one ventures)

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Wednesday, 3 July

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Boris is the founder of version one ventures, an early-stage fund that has made over 35 investments in consumer internet, SaaS and mobile companies across North-America. Previously, Boris was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, the world’s largest marketplace for new, used and rare and out-of print books which got sold to Amazon in 2008. Boris joined the company in 2002 after JustBooks, the German company he co-founded in 1999, was acquired by AbeBooks. Boris successfully finished his PhD as well as his graduate studies at the Otto Beisheim School of Management (WHU), Koblenz, majoring in Business Economics / Business Management. Current investments include Chloe & Isabel, Edmodo, Flurry, GoInstant (sold to Salesforce), Indiegogo, Indochino, Julep, Sparkbuy (sold to Google), Suite101, Top Hat Monocle, Wattpad and Yapta.

Let’s ask Nigel Morris, “What’s in your Wallet?”

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Startup Grind Washington DC has the extreme honor of hosting Nigel Morris, one of the founders of Capital One at the 1776 campus. Nigel, beyond creating one of the most known financial banking solutions in the world, has also invested in such companies like Webs.com, AddThis, and Braintree. Nigel provided the crowd with plenty of insight, and a lot of cheeky humor for good measure.

Nigel touched upon his life growing up in Britain as a rugger, eventually moving to Philadelphia and beginning his life working in the financial realm. When he met Rich Fairbank, his future co-founder, in Philadelphia, they went on to form the banking function at their company, SPA. While all the “superstars” were focusing on the bigger fish in the financial realm, namely real estate, Nigel decided to focus on the credit card industry when there was only one choice of credit options. At this time, more than half of the United States was without the option of credit with bad credit scores or high APRs acting as barriers, so Nigel and Rich decided to move into that space and disrupt it.

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Startup Grind Karachi Hosts Salim Ghauri (CEO, NetSol Technologies,President TiE-Lahore Chapter)

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Saturday, 6 July

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Mr. Salim Ghauri, CEO and Chairman, NetSol Technologies is one of the best known figures from the Pakistani IT industry. He has been cited as the ‘Bill Gates of Pakistan’, a reference to his incredible achievements as an IT entrepreneur. Founded by him in 1996, NetSol Technologies developed rapidly to become the leading software company of Pakistan and is today the only CMMI Level 5 organization in the country. It has been the country’s leading software exporter for many years and now caters to a truly impressive list of global blue chip customers, including some of the biggest names in the global IT industry.

Mr. Ghauri has brought a passion, energy and commitment to entrepreneurship in the country that continues to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs and students. The emergence of NetSol as a high quality organization reflects his belief in adopting global best practices in management. The company’s philosophy has been to invest in both processes and human capital. Mr. Ghauri remains a staunch and vocal supporter of talent development in the country through quality education and innovation. He has been on the board and advisory council of different educational institutions and is passionate about the future of high quality management and technology education in the country.

Besides his success as an astute entrepreneur, Mr. Ghauri remains active in other key roles. He is, at present, the Honorary Consul of Australia for Punjab. In addition, he has chaired the Federal Government’s ICT Task Force, which is entrusted with the task of reviewing national IT policy and providing recommendations in key IT related areas. Salim Ghauri is the President of TiE Lahore Chapter and President of the American Business Forum as well. He has also served as First Chairperson of Corporate Advisory Council (CAC) of NUST Institute of Information Technology. Recently, he has been bestowed the Honorary Fellowship of the Association of Business Executives, UK.