This CVC Workshop will feature Karen Moon, CEO and Co-founder of ERA-backed Startup Trendalytics. She will be discussing topics in building a start-up team: finding co-founders, determining equity splits and bringing on your first hires.

Venue

11th Floor of NYIT

About Karen Moon

Karen Moon is Co-founder and CEO of Trendalytics, which provides apparel and accessories companies decision support software that measures consumer engagement with merchandise trends. With over ten years of experience in fashion and technology, she has worked with department stores, luxury retailers and independent designers. At Goode Partners, she executed the firm’s investment in SkullCandy (NASDAQ: SKUL) and managed the turnaround of a luxury specialty retailer. Previously she worked in Gap Inc.’s Corporate Strategy group, where she assessed acquisition and new retail concept opportunities such as Piperlime.com. Karen started her career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs where she executed over $1 billion in technology and media transactions. Karen studied fashion at Otis College of Art & Design and holds a BA from UCLA and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She has contributed and also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Xconomy, TheNextWeb and other publications. Additionally, she has published an article on Forbes on first-time founders seeking technical talent: http://onforb.es/Q3fhd5

About CVC Workshops

CVC Workshops is an ongoing series intended to showcase and leverage the growing knowledge base and expertise that exists within the CVC organization. We typically feature a speaker who is an expert on a given subject, and focus each session on a specific area of entrepreneurship. Past workshops have included discussions around startup basics, like navigating a cap table for the first time and doing initial sales for a prototype product. CVC Workshops are highly interactive and are a great way to learn tangible insights around a particular topic that can be immediately applied to your business. Bring specific questions and practical use cases!

At Flatiron School, we use a project, playlister-rb, to move between the different layers of a web application and abstractions. First, we build a domain model that passes a test suite. Then we wrap a CLI application around that domain. Then we use ERB to generate a static version of a website. Then we implement a RACK layer to make a dynamic application. Then we implement Sinatra. Moving between these layers show interface independence of our models and the importance of a strong domain model. At this meetup, Avi Flombaum will walk through the various abstraction layers and demonstrate how powerful a well designed, interface independent, domain model is for application development.

Every week during the Flatiron School semester, 3 students will present a 20 minute talk and then we’ll have an hour of networking and discussion. Every Thursday from 7pm-9pm!

This week: Nom de Plume – an anonymous collaborative story generator using Twilio and web sockets to seamlessly handle live texts in the browser. Attendees will be able to participate in our story via text and see their contributions populate our site in real time!

See you Thursday!

PS – We are only charging $1 to ensure that RSVPs are somewhat meaningful. All proceeds will be donated to an open source project or Wikipedia. Feel free to just show up too.

We will have several startups present what they are working on.

1. SOCURE

Socure has developed a new form of online identity verification using a series of proprietary machine learning algorithms to analyze social and identity data.

2. MOVEN

Moven is a mobile money management startup that delivers real-time feedback on your purchases directly to your mobile phone. We’re a smarter way to manage your lifestyle, pay with your phone, and always stay on top of your spending.

3. SWAP

Swap.rs enables the purchase of any item in a store or web site using any vendors gift card or points. We increase foot traffic, shopping cart conversions and increase wallet share for our merchants.

4. Cheekd

Cheek’d bridges the gap between online dating and real-world romance by providing members with physical cards that they can use to entice people from the real world to flirt with them in the virtual world. It’s the 2.0 version of “Call Me.”

5. Patientsdb

Healthcare decision support and BI software system. It’s main purpose is to reduce healthcare costs for patients.

6. Jumpstart Wireless

Revolutionary Utility Mobility Platform for Enterprise Mobile apps

MESA+ is an early stage venture fund focused on e-commerce, advertising technology and digital content. We co-invest between $50,000 and $250,000 in Seed and Series A rounds alongside established early stage venture firms (we never lead a financing). We concentrate on the New York digital media market but are able to invest in companies headquartered in other cities across the country and around the world.

We support talented entrepreneurs building big businesses. To do that, we invest social capital that we believe is as valuable as our investment capital. This comes from tapping into our team’s global network of media, entertainment and technology relationships to provide investor introductions, executive team hiring, business development, client & advertiser introductions, and marketing support. Our goal is to help our portfolio companies whenever and wherever we can.

Jacob Brody (Partner) spends 100% of his time helping early stage companies in every way, shape and form. He is a mentor to numerous startups, advising them on financing, marketing, PR, product and corporate strategy. He is also a mentor at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and is the Co-founder of Standard Start, a non-profit providing standardized resources to venture-backed startups. Jacob previously worked as a staff writer / blogger for VentureBeat.

Happy hour to follow at 5pm

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Friday speaker series brings key thought leaders, investors, executives in an intimate fireside chat format conversational approach to giving entrepreneurs access to trends, ideas, process within large organizations and better understand how things work.

Imagine you had a meeting with these angels and access to ask anything.  The audience is kept small to allow for that engagement. More hard to reach guys are brought each Friday for real conversations.  Come learn about what you can’t “google” to stay updated on what the market wants and share a beer.