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The Top 10 Companies Acquiring and Investing in Ed Tech Startups

May 28, 2013 — Leave a comment

We all know the ED Tech Space is being disrupted. It’s also a very lucrative for both venture capital and founders building new educational platforms. CBInsights provides more data just how lucrative, as it reports that Ed Tech companies received $1.1 billion in venture capital in 2012. The report also provides us with a list of the top 10 companies acquiring and investing in Ed Tech Startups.

edtechcorps

With $1.1B in Ed Tech venture capital financing in 2012, we wanted to take a closer look at which of the larger education companies, both private and public, have been most active in both acquiring and investing in emerging, privately-held Ed Tech companies.

Based on M&A and financing data since 2010, London-based publisher Pearson tops the list with 15 acquisitions or investments in Ed Tech companies and is followed by Providence Equity Partners-owned education software provider Blackboard.

via CBInsights

If you’re in San Francisco on June 20th, join us for the Future of Education panel with founders from Udemy, Coursera and Imagine K12.

foundelry-logo-drk-450px

 

The Future of Education Panel

 

 Eren Bali
CEO & Founder | Udemy
 Andrew Ng
CTO | Coursera
 Tim Brady
Founder and Partner | Imagine K12
 Matthew Wise
CEO & Founder | Cosemble

Date & Time:
June 20, 7:00 P.M.
Location
4th St Studios‎
560 4th Street
San Francisco, CA 94107

 

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coffeestratups-400

Speakers Announced for CoffeeStartups Event: Chapter 1 – Launching

January 17, 2013 — 1 Comment

CoffeeStartups is for coffee lovers, storytellers, geeks, technologist, gourmets, and creative people passionate about sharing stories and drinking coffee. We’re bring together entrepreneurs, thought leaders, technologists, designers, and writers to share a unique story to the group.

Each CoffeeStartups event has a specific theme and we invite two people to present their story orally to the group. For Each participant takes turns acting as the moderator and the storyteller. At the end of the event we all walk away energized, inspired, motivated, and happy to have made some meaningful connections with fellow coffee lovers.

The January Theme for Coffee Startups is Launching and our speakers are:
coffeestartups-logo

</p><p>Micah Baldwin

Micah Baldwin
@micah
CEO, Founder, Graphicly

Tony Gauda

Tony Gauda
@tonygauda
CEO, Co-Founder,BitCasa

Our first event kicks off Saturday January, 26, at SOMAcentral, 153 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA. You can join the CoffeeStartups meetup group to stay connected and RSVP for tickets on Cosemble

If you interested in sponsoring we can be reached at contact@coffeestartups.com

http://www.meetup.com/CoffeeStartups/

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Join Us for CoffeeStartups Chapter 1- January 26 10am, San Francisco

January 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

coffee anybody??
flickr photo by anvancy

If there are two things I love it’s coffee and startups. You add those two ingredients and you have an awesome community. With that begin said I’m excited to partner with Matthew Wise cofounder of founderly to organize a series of CoffeeStartups events in San Francisco.

coffeestartups-logo

CoffeeStartups is for coffee lovers, storytellers, geeks, technologist, gourmets, and creative people passionate about sharing stories and drinking coffee. At each CoffeeStartups Stories event we bring together entrepreneurs, thought leaders, technologists, designers, and writers to share a unique story to the group.

Each CoffeeStartups event has a specific theme and we invite two people to present their story orally to the group. Each participant takes turns acting as the moderator and the storyteller. At the end of the event we all walk away energized, inspired, motivated, and happy to have made some meaningful connections with fellow coffee lovers.

Our first event kicks off Saturday January, 26, at SOMAcentral, 153 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA. You can join the CoffeeStartups meetup group to stay connected and RSVP for tickets on Cosemble

I’ll be announcing our first two speakers later this week. If you interested in sponsoring we can be reached at contact@coffeestartups.com

http://www.meetup.com/CoffeeStartups/

In Entrepreneurship, Events, Featured, Social Media , , , , , , , , ,
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Where Investors Go To Learn – Smart$Money Executive Program in Silicon Valley Kicks Off Next Week

November 9, 2012 — 1 Comment



Next week kicks off the StartupMonthly‘s Smart$Money Executive Program in Silicon Valley November 12-15. The StartupMonthly Smart$Money Executive program informs, inspires, educates, and prepares business angels and venture capitalists for their future investments in IT startups. During the program, investors will share and learn about angel and VC investments, deal-structure, market trends, and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Along with connecting to leading investors in Silicon Valley and visiting successful startups and companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. Also visiting accelerator programs such as 500 Startups.

I’m currently participating in Astia Angel Investor training and will be on the Angels Best Practices panel moderator by my good friend Robert Scoble on Tuesday during the Smart$Money Executive Program. Other panelist include Jeff Pulver, Zohar Levkovitz, Bill Reichart, Neal Strickberger, and Prashant Shah.

StartupMonthly’s Smart$Money Executive Program is organized by Pemo Theodore @pemo Media Producer, startup coach & founder EZebis: Winning the Venture Game!

The event overall has a rock star VC/investor line up including Steve Blank, Vivek Wadhwa, Cathy Lego , Chris Yeh and more. Take a look

In Events, Featured, Venture Captial , , , , ,
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Attending The 2012 Y Combinator Startup School at Stanford

October 2, 2012 — Leave a comment

startup school

Last year I was sitting at my desk in North Carolina watching Ron Conway Partner, SV Angel give his list of what he calls defining entrepreneurs at Startup School 2011. In his list Ron mentioned Jack Dorsey, Dennis Crowley and more. Ron along with other successful founders such as Drew Houston, Founder of Box, Stephen Cohen, founder of Palantir, Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Automattic, and of course Paul Grahman spoke at the event. My favorite talk in terms of value was Drew’s.

I applied last year to attend Startup School but wasn’t accepted. Yes, if you didn’t know Startup School is an invite only free one-day event held at Stanford. As you can see Startup School features a list of experts speaking about startups from their own experience. The 2012 list of Startup School Speakers include the following:

Patrick Collison
Founder, Stripe

Ron Conway
Partner, SV Angel

Ben Horowitz
Partner, Andreessen Horowitz; Founder, Opsware

Travis Kalanick
Founder, Uber

Jessica Livingston
Partner, Y Combinator

Hiroshi Mikitani
Founder, Rakuten

Tom Preston-Werner
Founder, GitHub

David Rusenko
Founder, Weebly

Ben Silbermann
Founder, Pinterest

Joel Spolsky
Founder, StackExchange, Fog Creek Software

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook

This year now a San Francisco resident, I’ll be attending Startup School. I’m excited to learn from a great list of successful founders along with networking with other Startup School attendees at Stanford. Last year Startup School was live streamed online and if you have a chance to watch I recommend you do so. I’ll share my Startup School experience here on this blog and have a goal of one day be invited to speak at Startup School.

CrunchBase Information
Y Combinator
Information provided by CrunchBase
In Entrepreneurship, Events, Featured, Startups , , ,
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Let’s meetup in Washington, DC to discuss Entrepreneurship & Startups

June 14, 2012 — Leave a comment

Capital Building
flickr photo by: deerhake.11

I’ll be in Washington, DC next week attending an event on the Hill and reached out to some friends to host a meetup on entrepreneurship & startups. If you’re in the area it would be great to connect. Details are below.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012 from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM (ET)

Affinity Lab
920 U Street NW
Washington, DC 20001

RSVP – http://startuptalesdc.eventbrite.com

Join DiversiTech and its supporters as we take a take a stroll on the journey of entrepreneurship. A unique program, the panel will highlight myths, experiences, possibilities and approaches to startup success.
See below for just a few questions the panel will tackle during the energized program:
To accelerate or not to accelerate?
If content is King, then branding must be Queen B?
Ditch the pitch and crowd fund to millions?

PANELISTS:
Kimberly Bryant, Founder of Black Girls Code

Hajj Flemings, Digital Brand Strategist/Co-Founder of Gokit

Wayne Sutton, CEO, Advisor

AGENDA:

6:00 pm – Registration & Networking

6:45 pm – Welcome & Quick Fire Introductions by Attendees
(Give your 30 second plug … GO!)

7:00 pm – Moderated Panel Dialogue
7:30 pm – Q&A
7:50 pm – Closing Comments
7: 55 pm – Networking
8:30 pm – Exit

A big thanks to Christine Celise, DiversiTech, Founder (@christinecelise) & her team for organizing the event.

Hope to see you there.

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Amazing opportunities: I’m Speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Conference & Web 2.0 NY – Thank You

September 20, 2011 — 7 Comments

opening doors

Last year I hinted around in a few blog post that I was done speaking at tech conferences for a few reasons. One being my first child was being born in January. Two, felling a little burnt out having speaking over 60 times in the last 4 years. Three, I wanted to focus more on doing what I love pre-twitter (2006) and before the web went social media crazy and that was entrepreneurship and launching my own startup. Four, being a little tired of the lack of diversity in web/tech/social, etc. Fast forward to today I’ve done most of that by only participating at SXSW 2011 and being on a panel at the Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference & Expo, along with co-launching the NewMe Accelerator in Silicon Valley.

Currently I’m planning a few projects and also working on my next trick. Then two amazing opportunities just opened up for me last week. One was being asked to be on a panel at the Congressional Black Caucus Conference about Social Media & Entrepreneurship. The panel takes place Friday, September 23, 2011, 1:30-3:30pm. You can follow the conference hashtag at 41stALC for updates. We’ll announce a panel hashtag soon too. Other panelist will include the following:
Chris Genteel, Google
Susan Gonzales, Facebook
Patricia Cesaire, Black Enterprise
BMaynard Scaborough, One Economy Corporation
Hajj Flemings, Gokit, BrandCamp University

alc2011_flyer2

If you’re attending the panel feel free to add yourself to the plancast event here: http://plancast.com/p/7loh/panel-social-media-entrepreneurship-using-technology-build-successful-business

The second opportunity is O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference in New York. My session topic is “Prepare for the 2012 Social Media Landscape and will be on Thursday, October 13, 3:15. Yep, social media. Web 2.0 is one of the conferences you want to say you have spoken at that’s on your bucket list. I’m excited, nervous and focused to delver value in this session. So if the world doesn’t end in 2012 you’ll at least know how to use social media. If you’re planning to attend Web 2.0 NY register today with discount code webny11alx107 to save an extra 20%. The code expires September 22.

I just want to say thank you to my readers, followers, friends, supporters, heck everyone who really cares. Without your support and encouragement a lot of the opportunites that I’ve had would never happened. Keep being awesome and although my inbox(email & voice) stays full and it’s hard to get back with everyone, feel free to call or email or leave a comment if you need anything.

Have a successful future.

In Diversity, Events, Featured, Speaking ,
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