Learn from master bootstrap entrepreneurs this Wednesday, 6pm.
Announcement
On March 31st, the Rice Alliance Austin Chapter is presenting a panel discussion on how to self-fund a business without raising money. Moderated by Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin, the panel will include CEOs who have successfully bootstrapped a company and generated revenue without becoming beholden to outside investors.
Moderator: Bijoy Goswami
Panelists:
Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcycle
As COO, Neelan is responsible for marketing, business development and strategic management of Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza. With over 1.5 million users in over 60 countries and over 7 million e-books downloaded, Stanza is the most popular e-book reader for the iPhone and IPod Touch. Neelan frequently keynotes about e-books at conferences like Tools of Change and BookNet Canada. Prior to joining Lexcycle, Neelan was the COO at SpringSource, the company behind the popular open source Spring Framework. At SpringSource, Neelan helped grow the company 5X in 18 months and led the effort to raise a $10M first round of financing from Benchmark Capital. Neelan has extensive technology management experience, having served as the co-founder and President at SolarMetric, a leading object relational mapping provider, which was acquired by BEA Systems in 2005. At BEA, Choksi was instrumental in the open sourcing of the acclaimed object/relational mapping tool Kodo as OpenJPA. Prior to SolarMetric, Neelan worked for TechTrader, Andersen Consulting Strategic Services (NYSE: ACN) and Exxon Research & Engineering (NYSE: XOM). Neelan has spoken frequently at a variety of conferences on various technology business topics especially the business of open source. Neelan currently serves on the boards of SpringSource and Tasktop Technologies. Neelan is a graduate of MIT (and was part of the often-publicized MIT Blackjack team), Stevens Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business.
Mike Kadyan, Co-founder and President of Crimson
Crimson is a software company that provides Physician Management software to hospitals. Crimson was acquired by The Advisory Board Company in May of 2008. Prior to Crimson, Mike was CEO and co-founder of WhisperWire, an enterprise software company in the CRM space. The company was acquired by Convergys (NYSE:CVG), a $2 billion technology services company. He previously also ran the telecom services business unit at Trilogy, a software company specializing in the interactive selling market and was also a senior consultant at Accenture. Mike has a BS in Information Systems from Boston University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Nick Herman, Co-founder and Search Marketing Director of Adlucent
As co-founder and Search Marketing Director of Adlucent, Nick has been instrumental in driving significant self-funded revenue growth for the company and its clients. He brings over six years of experience in strategic search marketing and bid management to deliver highly optimized campaigns and continuous results for the world's largest Internet retailers. Nick continues to apply his learnings to the vision and implementation of Adlucent’s Deep Search™ technology, which has enabled 3000% revenue growth for the company over the last four years. Nick is highly devoted to creating a close-knit and collaborative company culture at Adlucent. In addition to his passion for helping clients win and creating a great place to work, Nick loves music and is often seen as DJ Silverhero in Austin music venues.
Cost to attend:
Registration Fee: $20
Walk-up fee: $25
Pre-registration deadline: March 27th
Registration:
Click here to register online
Date: March 31, 2009
Time: 6:00 PM
Location:
Intercontinental Stephen F. Austin Hotel
701 Congress Ave.
Austin, TX 78710