From an Idea to a Business

Wow.  I wrote the below text and never published this to the live version of this blog.  This event is now over, but I still want to post this marketing text, just because I use this blog to keep track of these events.

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We spent a bunch of hours nagging CEO's in the days after their return from vacation to speak at our first Venture Lab event in the fall 2007 series.  If you're interested, we'll see you Thursday night downtown!

Below is the official marketing text and you can register here.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

From an Idea to a Business

Location : One Union Square Boardroom
600 University St., First Level
Seattle, WA 98101
Lower lobby, 6th Avenue level, behind the escalator)
Date & Time : September 6, 2007 - 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

It all starts with an idea. Many successful startups begin when a passionate entrepreneur conceives of a brilliant idea. Many unsuccessful startups fail when the entrepreneur does not succeed at converting that idea into a profitable business. Successfully turning that brilliant idea into a profitable business is the art of entrepreneurship.

In the first event of the fall Venture Lab series on business vision, Alexander Castro, CEO & co-founder of Pluggd, Andy Sack, a Serial Entrepreneur, and Adam Philipp of the Axios Law Group will deal with the process of turning an idea into a business. Please join them as they share their knowledge, experience and perspective surrounding this exciting topic.

Topics covered will include:

• How to analyze the market effectiveness of your idea
• How to build an organization around your idea
• How to protect your idea (specifically dealing with intellectual property protection and patent/trade secret options)

Alexander Castro - CEO and co-founder - Pluggd

Alexander has deep product and management experience from Microsoft, Amazon, and Trilogy. At Microsoft he was the Group Program Manager for the MSN Entertainment business unit, which included the MSN Music, Video, Movies, and TV websites. He also drove the company’s device synchronization strategy for Windows Vista and was a key member of the CRM team. At Trilogy, Alex led the successful deployment of a complex CRM solution for Toyota, and was responsible for the marketing and program management of Amazon’s web services and oversaw the launch of the Mechanical Turk online marketplace.

Alexander holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Computer Science from Cornell University, where he also completed coursework at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management. As an undergrad, he was named a AT&T Bell Laboratories Scholar, which provided a full scholarship to the college of his choice and an opportunity to work on digital media, voice over IP, and speech recognition at Bell Labs. As a graduate student, Alex was a recipient of a full tuition scholarship from the Microsoft Corp.

Andy Sack – Serial Entrepreneur

Andy is a high technology serial entrepreneur. Most recently, Andy has been entrepreneur in residence (EIR) for Mobius Venture Capital (formerly SOFTBANK) and a regular lecturer at University of Washington Business’ School. During his tenure as an EIR, Andy has been founder and board member to three companies: Bodyshop Digital, Kefta, and Quova. Prior to this, Andy founded and sold two successful Internet companies; abuzz technologies and firefly network. Andy was CEO at abuzz from 1996 to 1999 when he sold the company to the New York Times Digital unit. During Andy's tenure at the company, abuzz was named number one in the Internet software category by Red Herring Magazine and number one company to work for by Boston Magazine. Prior to abuzz, Andy was a co-founder of Firefly Network, which was later sold to Microsoft Corporation. Andy has advised a number of companies including m-value, Cambridge Incubator, lease forum, and Green Order. Andy was a founder and board member of Students for Responsible Business. He received a BA from Brown University and an MBA from MIT. Andy lives in Seattle, WA.

Adam L.K. Philipp – Axios Law Group

Mr. Philipp has been involved in the prosecution of patent applications in the computer science, electrical devices and related fields since 1998 and with Internet and technology related law since 1995. He also counsels clients on patent portfolio strategy, patentability and infringement matters. His varied practical experiences range from distributed object oriented programming to kernel-level memory management. His area of emphasis covers a wide variety of patent, trademark and trade secret issues, with particular focus on network and security related applications. Typical clients of Mr. Philipp’s are software and technology companies as well as related inventors.  Mr. Philipp speaks fluent Hebrew and basic Japanese. He and his family live in the Seattle area.