Startup! Real Stories and Life-saving Tips:
A Panel Discussion with Leading Entrepreneurs, VCs, Angel Investors

In many ways, it's never been easier to start a company. Bootstrapping is often a viable choice, but some businesses are almost impossible to launch without capital. There are endless books and blogs from the viewpoint of VCs espousing philosophies about how to raise venture capital, but the actual process from Day One of making the decision to raise money is still a black hole, left to private meetings, phone calls, and known to a relatively small population.

Designers and technologists often have little or no experience dealing with investors, and even learning a new vocabulary to talk with VCs is often the first stumbling block.

Join us for an evening with drinks and a veteran panel of entrepreneurs, angel investors and VCs features Allison Goldberg (Time Warner Investments), Ryan Freitas (About.me), Rick Webb (Quotidian Ventures, Barbarian Group), Gino Zahnd (Cozy, Flickr, Kosmix, Splunk) and John Bragg (Cozy, Kosmix).

In this panel, you'll learn the crucial information that doesn't exist in books, blogs, or elsewhere, such as:

* How do you get started?
* What sorts of people are the right people to talk to?
* How do you get meetings with these people?
* Does no mean no? Silence?
* What's the right amount of money?
* What happens once the VC joins your board?

Speakers:

Gino Zahnd is the CEO and Co-founder of Cozy. Before Cozy, he was a founder and CEO of Seabright Studios in San Francisco. He's been a UX practitioner and leader in core teams at Flickr, Splunk, Kosmix, Adaptive Path, and Studio Archetype. He loves creating products that solve real problems.

John Bragg is the CTO and Co-founder of Cozy. Before Cozy, he co-founded Seabright Studios, a San Francisco-based user experience firm. He started his career as a network security engineer at Capital One (before the caveman television adverts). After fighting the bad guys for years, he focused his energy on design simplicity and fast, elegant code.

Allison Goldberg is Managing Director & Vice President of Time Warner Investments, where she is focused on equity investments in companies that directly enhance Time Warner's ability to meet specific strategic goals, including the delivery of new services, enhancement of an existing product, entry or expansion into a key strategic market, completion of a strategic partnership, and critical research and development.

Ryan Freitas is the co-founder and product lead of about.me, now an AOL property. He is a long-serving practitioner, consultant and speaker within the interaction design and UX communities. As an advisor and seed investor, he remains an outspoken voice on how startups should approach product design. He lives in San Francisco, California with his wife Kristen and their baby boy, Dashiell.

Rick Webb currently serves as a consultant to Tumblr on Marketing and Revenue, a mentor to Tech Stars NY, and as a venture partner at Quotidian Ventures. Finally, Rick is the founder and CEO of Secret Clubhouse, a tech coworking space in Williamsburg, NY.

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