Startup UCLA and TEC-Bruins Spring Networking Night!

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Where: Young Research Library (YRL) Room 11348 (North Campus), in the Northeast corner of YRL, behind Cafe 451
When: Wednesday, April 18th, 2012, 6-9pm

Register Now

Do you want to join a startup? Or are you starting a company and looking for people to join your team? Or maybe just interested in meeting other members of LA’s start-up scene? Startup UCLA and TEC Bruins can help with our Spring Networking Night! The event will run from 6-9 p.m. Wednesday April 18 and will feature food, a mixer, a panel presentation on networking tips and tricks, and a recruitment fair for UCLA start-ups. No matter where you are in your plans, this is your chance to really connect with people who can help you achieve your start-up goals.

Space at the event will be first-come, first-served, so please register as soon as possible to make sure you’ll get a space.

Event Details
6-7 p.m.: Reception (free food!) in YRL Presentation Room
7-7:45: Networking panel presentation by Alex Capecelatro (hyphos.com) and Nick Davis (pwc.com) and Q&A in YRL Conference Room
7:45-9: [Track A: Recruitment Fair] in YRL Presentation Room: Startup companies will have table space and will be able to talk to interested recruits. Startups can use our RSVP form to register for their table.
or
7:45-9: [Track B: Mixer] in YRL Conference Room: For those who don’t need to recruit people to their startup or aren’t at the stage where they’re ready to join a team, they will have a chance to practice their networking skills and techniques in a mixer immediately following the panel.

Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) to Speak at UCLA

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Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology, author of The Lean Startup, and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. In 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.

Eric Reis will speak at Shoenberg Hall. NCIIA and the Technical Entreprenuerial Community will be showcased at this event.

Janet Zhou Inspires at First Startup UCLA Event

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Janet Zhou filled the room at the first Startup UCLA event last Thursday evening. More than 100 members of the UCLA community attended, and most stayed well past the official ending time. Janet started her talk with this point: it used to be that when you graduated college you could either get a job or go to graduate school. Now there is another option: start your own venture. Based on her own experiences, Janet discussed four lessons she has learned – ones we all would be well advised to attend to.

Lesson 1: Choose your partners carefully. Who you work with is much more important than your business idea, according to Janet.

Lesson 2: Learn to fail. Being able to recognize the shortcomings of your own idea, and then quickly revise and improve it, is critical for success.

Lesson 3: Take advantage of “the golden years.” Many of the most successful startup teams (think Larry and Sergei) met as students. Being a student not only gives you access to an incredible talent pool, but also gives you license to do things – and approach people – you cannot do as easily once you are older.

Lesson 4: Learn to tell a good story. Getting your idea off the ground will depend to a large degree on your ability to explain, in stories, what you idea is, and how it can connect with all kinds of people.

Anderson student’s start-up company competes for investors in Fast Pitch Competition

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Anderson graduate student Jonathan Lehmann represented UCLA at the Fast Pitch Competition. He had 90 seconds to present his idea and earn funding for his company, KarmaGoat.

For the sixth year, UCLA hosted the Fast Pitch Competition apart of National Entrepreneurship Week, which is organized by the Los Angeles investment group called the Tech Coast Angels. Since founded in 1999, TCA has invested $100 million and received over $1 billion in returns from these investments, said Robert Jadon, co-chair of Fast Pitch. The competition consists of 8-10 entrepreneurs giving fast pitches to a panel of investors and other members of Southern California’s entrepreneurial community. Pitches are judged on the quality of the CEO’s presentation and the company’s investment potential.

Johnathan Lehmann, a UCLA Anderson Business School graduate student presented his idea to investors for funding. As Jonathan Lehmann prepared to move from Paris to Los Angeles, he compiled a bag of items he no longer wanted, but he felt they should go to people who would appreciate them as much as he did. Lehmann’s dilemma inspired him to create a Facebook-integrated website that would allow users to sell items on an online marketplace and give 85 percent of the proceeds to a charity of the seller’s choice. Lehmann spent the summer developing the business model for his new company, an online commerce site with proceeds going to charity, which he decided to call KarmaGoat. The name of the company represents two concepts. The cycle of rebirth defines karma. Quote: “The goat represents a commodity that, while not useful to the donor, acts as a source of food and clothing to the recipient”.