Columbia Venture Community Blog

We had our CVC incubation event on March 4th and the ideas and pitches were absolutely fascinating spanning from sex toys to bottled water to fashion big data. One of the exciting things about CVC Incubation is virtually everyone who pitches is met with immediate offers from the group for introductions to potentially helpful people. "Oh, I know the (decision-maker) of (a relevant company or organization), did you want me to connect you?" I'm proud to be part of such a well-connected, generous and friendly group. We'll be doing it again in a few months. Here's a roundup of the presenters:

Peter pitched "More the merrier"(www.morethemerrier.com), a sort of "kickstarter for events" in which event organizers set the number of people they want to attend and attendees are offered various incentives to RSVP and get additional people to RSVP.  The site is built and has already been used by 3 events. There is a "scanning party" event coming up that I'd love to go to but will be out of town: http://morethemerrier.com/events/21 Peter shared his experiences that short videos worked well and that he was essentially offering a "concierge" service behind the scenes to better understand his users.

www.morethemerrier.com

Camille, a CBS alum, arrived with bottles of her "All Beauty Water"(http://allbeautywater.com/), a zero-calorie drink with vitamins for your skin. We had a Shark Tank moment where we passed around cups and sampled the drink as she spoke. (It was very good!) She shared her story about identifying an opportunity in the beverage market and working on this while holding a full time job. All Beauty is already in 12 locations including our beloved West Side Market and she's looking for two things: introductions to distributors (gym owners, whole foods, Garden of Eden), and influencers who could do reviews.

http://allbeautywater.com/

Alex, who has a background in psychology and consumer goods, but has had her eye on being a sex therapist, shared a more risque product concept she's been working on: wearable tech for couples. She taught us about the "orgasm gap"(http://www.alternet.org/sex-amp-relationships/orgasm-gap-real-reason-women-get-less-often-men-and-how-fix-it), that in committed relationships, women don't orgasm nearly as much as men. She thinks she has the solution with a very small, hands-free, personal stimulation product for women to use during sex. She thinks the market has a lot of devices for women that tend to be toys on the bigger side and can be an ego bash for men. We all blushed a little during this discussion, a bit more when Alex displayed a cartoon vagina on her iPad! And a bit more when, in response to a question about how the device would fit women of differing shapes and sizes, Alex described that its sides would be adjustable, "like a ninja climbing a chimney". Alex is looking for a hardware co-founder who understands how to prototype toys. She has funds to pay or can offer sweat equity.

Rabina, another CBS alum, shared her (future) problem of finding high quality lessons for her two young children. She wants to help them develop their curiosity but wants to locate specific kinds of instructors, such as ones who specialize in children of a certain age or ability. Searches for "piano lessons" often come up with a laundry list of results and busy moms (she's one) don't have time to talk to providers. Summer camp would be another common pain point. She imagined a "yelp for kids activities" that might be curated by parents.

Io, who was preparing to leave for Africa in a week, discussed his idea for a waste-management company in West Africa, similar to RecycleBank (founded by a fellow CBS alum). Getting people involved would be a challenge, but the payoff, such as organic fertilizer, can save a lot of money.

Jade is one of three co-founders of a 7-month-old startup called Style Sage(http://www.stylesage.co/), which looks at social signals to determine trends in fashion. She identified four "make or break" factors for fashion businesses: designs, pricing, quantity and location. They're regularly indexing 30 million products with 15 million photos to try to make sense of various indicators and determine things like predicting seasonal trends with confidence. She's looking for connections to retail people and brands.

http://www.stylesage.co/

Great demo night featuring:

Try The World (www.trytheworld.com) - Try The World is the first subscription box company delivering curated food and cultural products from a different country every time, to your door.

BlitzCare (www.myblitzcare.com) - BlitzCare utilizes the latest technology to connect you with an online doctor without ever stepping foot in an office or hospital.

FeatureKicker (http://www.featurekicker.com/) - Better products, less engineering waste. Add and test new product features before building those features. Gather customer insights while customers interact with your new features.

Valet.io (www.valet.io) - Nonprofit galas are boring and awkward. Valet.io makes mobile software to get guests excited about raising money for a great cause.

See you all in Oct.

It was awesome to have Dror Futter from SorinRand with us last week discussing "Top Ten Things Your Startup Lawyer Should Tell You." It was a lively chat going through topics from founder dispute to corporate formation to attorney client privileges.

Thank you WeWork and Lambda for hosting us and thank you Dror for spending the time. 

  Great event with about 30 people having a lively discussion with Karen Moon, CEO and Co-founder of ERA-backed Startup Trendalytics. She discussed topics in building a start-up team: finding co-founders, determining equity splits and bringing on your first hires.

WeeSpring presenting to a packed room....

June Demo Night saw CVC returning to the new minted law firm of Dentons. The night saw 4 fantastic companies present:

Assemble Up (formerly Chimpdig) (www.assembleup.com) - Assemble Up is a real estate fund raising portal connecting Places with Faces: They aim to be the platform for raising real estate capital, investing in real estate projects and networking.

Foodfan Select (www.foodfanselect.com) - Foodfan Select is a membership program where a group of higher-end restaurants offer a consistent 15-30% discount only to our select members, whenever they dine out.

Soldthru (www.soldthru.com) - Soldthru provides pricing optimization for ecommerce retailers through merchandising analytics and dynamically pricing inventory to maximize margins.

weeSpring (www.weespring.com) - weeSpring helps new and expecting parents collect advice from their friends about what they need for their baby. 

All in all, it was a great night. All of these businesses had solid ideas and are ready to execute. 

See you at the next event.

Shh...they're incubating....

Last night we had another CVC Incubation event at The Bean and welcomed a group of newcomers (we love to see new faces at CVC events)!  

"Incubation" is all about sharing your germ of an idea to an intimate group of curious people and seeing what they think.  We encourage participants to come with any idea that is at any stage - from very early to a product you've already launched - to gather rapid feedback and constructive criticism.  The goal is to get you to come away with some concrete next steps so you can keep moving.

We drank some chai, Blue Moon and wine and discussed some interesting ideas and offered feedback on possible next steps.  Here's a little taste:

> Nigel (Journalism '12) wants to create an app that pings you when you're near a bar that has a happy hour or deal going on.  He envisions bar owners as having control over when to post their deals and specials. Users get notifications if they're nearby.  Sort of ScoutMob for bars but with notifications and bars can manage their own deals.  Suggestions included finding out what ever happened to MyOpenBar.com (a similar idea that ran for several years) and why they closed up shop.

> Sarah (Law '10) pitched an "Uber for tailors" with a focus on women's clothing. So if you're a busy professional and buy a discount suit that needs adjustments, this service would help you locate the right tailor who can come, measure and get you the turnaround and price you need.  We learned that it's hard to find tailors who specialize in women's clothing.  We thought "before and after" photos of the garments would increase customer confidence about the tailors.  Next steps included building a landing page with unbounce.com or Kickofflabs.com and buying some Google Ads to get some feedback and learn about acquisition costs.

> Becks began his pitch with a usability test! He passed around his Android (pointed to a newly designed landing page) and asked that everyone note a) where does your eye go on the page, and b) what do you think the service does/what's your expectation?  His service helps travelers select seats on the flight and discover deals in destination cities.

Our next event will be in about 2 months. Stay tuned for the announcement on Meetup!

Over 200 CVCers crowded the Columbia Club this past Wednesday to celebrate another successful year for the organization. A great time was had by all and this was the biggest CVC event ever! In addition to strong drinks and good conversation, the CVC Roars were announced. 

With that, here are some pics from the event:

Evan Sanchez, CVC President, talking about last year's accomplishments

Alison Lindland awarding Best New Company to Venture for America

  Uri Weg, VP of Online Community, poses with his CVC Roar.

Bostonian CVCers enjoying a brew.

This March, CVC came in Boston with its Inaugural Happy Hour, at Meadhall in Kendall Square in Cambridge. About 25 CVC members and local Columbia alums spent about three hours drinking, snacking and catching up on all things entrepreneurship in Boston. It was a great turnout, with attendees represented the diverse industries here in Boston... consumer Internet, Biotech, a cellphone battery-rental company and health sciences... plus a couple of lawyers and MBA types that live locally.

There's pretty good demand from all the attendees for future events, and for investment in our community, so keep an eye out for more programming throughout the year.

If you've got an idea or are interested in helping out, please feel free to join the Meetup Group and reach out to Michael Degnan, CVC's Boston Lead.

A panorama of an idea explosion...

We had a great turnout for the CVC Incubation meetup last Tuesday at The Bean in the East Village.  This was the first CVC event for nearly everyone, which is great to see.  And 7 people discussed their ideas, so we got through a lot of brainstorming and feedback.

  Here's a taste:

  > Cynthia is working on a way to put professionals into classrooms so high school students could learn directly about things like entrepreneurship or journalism.  The group suggested pursuing the Khan Academy model, to be a facilitator of online materials, to check out Engineers w/o Borders, PND (http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/), Mathlete, and consider who you’re pitching to: teacher, student or parent, and craft the right message.

  > David pitched “Spend my money” in which people write in elaborate ways they’d spend his $20 and, if selected, film themselves doing it.  Right not he’s been hustling by using Facebook for submissions and posting to youtube. One noteworthy winner spent the $20 by taking a homeless person to lunch and interviewing him.  Another idea was to give coffee away with $1 at the bottom of the cups.

  > Shawn kicked off a discussion about a mobile service that was described as “Seamless for everything BUT food”.  Some suggestions included checking out “Buzz the bar” and Centzy (which does something similar).

  > Sophie introduced us to a mobile app she’s already building at Columbia that recommends great dishes to users and learns their eating habits.  It looks at the actual menu items at restaurants to suggest meals.  Comments included: how do you get a critical mass of data about the dishes, check out Restaurant Sciences, (a startup that attempted something similar), how do you deal with a changing menu.  One recommendation was to utilize lots of different landing pages for different users and diets and see which one has the best conversions and go after that group – like paleo or celiac - as a starting point.

  > Mike asked the age old question: is it better to ask a lot of potential customers what they think of an idea first or build a product and go and test it with customers.  There seemed to be a unanimous vote that the former – test ideas first, then build – was the way to go.  This is the “Lean Startup” mentality and can save you a lot of time and money plus keep you on the right path.  One awesome suggestion was to not only have a landing page showcasing an as-yet-unbuilt product, but add in a payment page too! Except have it just lead to an error message and don’t actually process payments, just to see if you’re able to convert leads to paying customers in your landing page test.  Many folks seemed to agree that entrepreneurs don’t do enough research before diving into ideas.

  > Guy pitched his genome research software solution which could, for example, power how 23andMe does its diagnostics and analyses.  One of his partners is a Columbia professor.

  We’re planning on having a CVC incubation event every 2 months so stay tuned and keep honing those ideas!  Big thanks to The Bean (http://thebeannyc.com/) for hosting us.

An eager participant asks a question...

The first demo night of the year started strong with a great crop of companies:

Bring Me That (www.bringmethat.com) - Aggregating restaurant delivery menus through a variety of data sources and using them to enable online ordering.

Prudena (www.prudena.com) - Developing risk management and investment tools to improve your investment performance.

Closet Dash (www.closetdash.com) - ClosetDash is the ONLY place to shop or swap for the fashions you love!

37 Angels (www.37angels.com) - 37 Angels is an angel investing network for women investors, investing in early stage male and female led ventures.  We're looking for women angels (experienced and aspiring - we have a great training program for the latter group).

Join us April 24th for the best one

Dave Lerner (Board Member, CVC), Sree Sreenivasan (Chief Digital Officer, Columbia University), Joe Rizk (Board Member, CVC)

On March 12th, the CVC Speaker Series hosted Sree Sreenivasan, Chief Digital Officer of Columbia University. Sree shared his thoughts for Columbia's "digital campus", his views on how online learning can and will transform education, and how founders should be harnessing social to help grow their businesses.  Some takeaways from the session:

- Social media isn’t a broadcasting channel. It’s a listening channel. So much value for brands if they embrace two-way conversation.

- Always reach out on social when you don't need anything.  The first time you message someone shouldn't be an ask.

- In 1996, there was one newspaper with a paywall (WSJ). Today, there are 350.

- For online video learning, videos should be 8-15 mins (TED Talk length). Hard to focus if they're much longer.

- Columbia is launching online courses on @Coursera this spring http://bit.ly/Y8m9M7 

Comments from the audience are at #CVCsree and Sree has also posted all of the slides from the talk at: bit.ly/cvcsree

On Thursday December 6th, the Metropolitan Pavilion was filled with entrepreneurship enthusiasm. The night began with an inspiring, informative, and light-hearted conversation between Ben Horowitz of AndreessenHorowitz and Bill Campbell of Intuit. Their dialogue was followed by a speech by Adnan Durrani of the Columbia Engineering Advisory Board and an open forum to meet some promising new start ups.

The full list of startups:

Jibon Health

Radiator Labs

Udacomm

Dean's List

Inludus

Cellanyx

Trendseeder

Dip Jar

Lumiode

Sportaneous

A good time was had by all and CVC was proud to participate. 

Thanks to Chris McGarry and his team.

We’re headed west!  Through the years we’ve heard from many of our members that they're based in the SF Bay Area, so we’re opening a new branch to support entrepreneurship amongst Columbians out west. Bartek Ringwelski will be leading the efforts in the Bay Area. He’s a CVC vet and a badass entrepreneur based in San Francisco. 

To launch the new chapter, we invited Bay Area members to join us for our first event - Happy Hour on Thursday, Dec. 13.  You can read about it here.

We had a great turn out for our inaugural event.  Over mixed drinks and locally brewed craft beer, Columbia Alums ranging from CBS '76 to CC'12 connected about tech life in the Bay Area.  We also had two NYC-based CVC'ers who happened to be in town and dropped by.

With space for only 30 people, the event sold out in 24hrs - validating the MVP that there's a community of Alums in the Bay Area who want to connect. The most common question was: "When's the next one?" 

About a dozen intrepid young students came out to network and hear from Anna Curan, a senior member of Plum Alley. 

Anna shared her story and took questions from the audience. The discussion evolved into a classroom atmosphere with people sharing their experiences and advice. All around it was a great event.

Notes from the event can be found here.

On Friday, September 28th, 2012  more than 1,000 job seekers and almost 90 companies attended the NYC Startup Job Fair Presented by AT&T at 7 World Trade Center. This was the first time the NYC Startup Job Fair had hosted a fall event and it was a huge success. During the event, NYC’s top startups (including Etsy, ZocDoc, 10gen, Lot18, Spotify and more) greeted job seekers with unsurpassed enthusiasm as they sought candidates for roughly 600 local positions. The candidates—undergraduates, MBAs, developers, web designers, marketers—spanned from entry to senior level, gathering from across the Northeast (and even flying in from as far away as Colombia).

The event had a strong Columbia contingent with several hundred students and alumni attending as well as a number Columbia affiliated startups. One of the tables featured Columbia’s newest co-working space, Columbia Business Lab and 5 of its portfolio companies.  If you were unable to attend, a list of the startups can be found on the STARTUP LIST page and available positions can be found on the JOBS page.

Job Seekers can sign-up to be notified about our next event – JOB SEEKER SIGNUP

Startups can sign-up to be notified about our next event – STARTUP SIGNUP