BootstrapLabs Talks AI at Law Firm K&L Gates

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Pittsburg, PA, March 16, 2017 – This past March, BootstrapLabs co-founder Ben Levy spoke at the headquarters of international law firm K&L Gates for their AI event, The Artificial Intelligence Gateway For the Investment and Business Community.

AI at K&L Gates

Ben’s presentation was focused on the current investment landscape for AI applications across key global business sectors, including the effects of AI on legal practice in business. The event also featured speakers Howie Choset, CTO for the ARM Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and Michael Wagner, CEO and co-founder of Edge Case Research.

The K&L Gates AI Initiative assists business clients in capitalizing on the most recent advancements in AI technology and best practices surrounding its investment and application. The launch of the AI initiative follows the firm’s announcement earlier this month of a $10 million gift to Carnegie Mellon University for the establishment of the “K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies,” to study the ethical issues posed by artificial intelligence. Partners from the firm later spoke at BootstrapLabs’ Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference 2017 in May.

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BootstrapLabs at the AI By The Bay Conference

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San Francisco, March 5, 2017 – Our co-founder Ben Levy spoke on the AI Venture Capital Panel at the AI By The Bay Conference on March 5th in San Francisco.

Ben shared BootstrapLabs’ vision about where and why to invest in early stage AI startups, as well as insights on AI talent wars and other challenges of being a founder today. You can watch the panel here. Ben spoke alongside:

  • Bradford Cross, Founding Partner, DCVC
  • Jake Flomenberg, Partner, Accel
  • Adam Kell, Partner, Comet Labs
  • Jean Xin. Partner, DCVC

The AI By The Bay Conference is an immersive three-day conference of AI learning and networking, ranging from drilled down technical knowledge sharing to overarching strategy, and focuses on both startup and enterprise contexts.

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How to Learn Machine Learning by Ben Levy

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(This article was originally published at techemergence.com)

How to Learn Machine Learning – an Investor’s Perspective

Episode Summary: There’s been lot of hype around AI and ML in business over the past five years. Even among investors exist a lot of misconceptions about using ML in a business context, and how to get up to speed on and learn machine learning as it applies to utility in industry. Recently, I talked with Benjamin Levy of BootstrapLabs in San Francisco, whom I met through an investment banking friend in Boston.

BootstrapLabs invests in Bay area companies, and Levy also travels around the world speaking about investing in AI companies and raising funds for new ventures. In this episode, Levy gives his perspective on what investors and executives get wrong about ML and AI, and discusses how they can get up to speed and leverage the applications for these technologies and related expertise to really make a difference (i.e. increased ROI) in their businesses.

Expertise: Technology; Corporate Development & Strategy; Product Development

Brief Recognition: Ben Levy is the co­-founder of BootstrapLabs, a leading venture capital firm, based in Silicon Valley and focused on Applied Artificial Intelligence.

Born in France and living in Silicon Valley for the past 18 years, Ben is a repeat entrepreneur who launched, built, and exited two startups in the financial technology space. Praedea Solutions, a data mining software company using machine learning and image recognition technology, was acquired by Mergent in 2005, and InsideVenture, a financial social network for the founders of venture-­backed pre-­IPO startups and long­-only institutional investors on Wall Street, was acquired by SecondMarket in 2009 (and is now part of NASDAQ).

Earlier in his career, Ben was a Technology, Media, and Telecom Investment Banker who advised startup founders and CxOs of Fortune 500 companies on corporate strategy, financing, and M&A. Ben is also a frequent keynote and panel speaker on innovation, technology investing, entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence, and globalization in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Current Affiliations: Co-founder of BootstrapLabs

Interview Highlights:

The following is a condensed version of the full audio interview, which is available in the above links on TechEmergence’s SoundCloud and iTunes stations.

(1:54) What do you see as some of the bigger misconceptions around machine learning in industry by business people and investors?

Benjamin Levy: We’ve had the benefit of traveling around the world…we talk to executives, family offices, people that are running businesses, and I think there’s been a lot of hype around AI…it’s nothing new, it’s been around about 50 years, there’s been an incredible breakthrough lately, but that’s coming as a result of the explosion of big data, of computing power at scale…

…I think it actually starts with basic lack of understanding of how the technology is going to impact their business…if you’re a business person, at the end of the day, you’re going to be caring about your ROI—is my product better, faster, cheaper; am I selling it to my customers and are my customers happier, and am I competitive. In 2 to 3 years, people will not be selling you AI software, they’ll be selling you upgrades, and that upgrade will have a lot of machine intelligence and a lot of AI, and you’re not going to talk about it because the way you sell AI technology is not going to change…now, the ability that you have as an executive, to have the right talent in-house to evolve your products so that they become smarter…that is the hard part….

(7:20) Talk about the notion (that you mentioned) of “lumpier” in the markets —what do you mean in that regard?

BL: If you look at the global perspective…just from a pure business stand point, we live in a world that is a lot more subject to interconnections and prices impacting one another and the terminal effect, I think in a world where we’re going to continue to see these ups and downs…the waves of disruptions are going to come in faster and faster…if you think about AI, we went from a world where we started to automate to a world that’s becoming more autonomous, a lot more intelligent; so we look at a world that is machine intelligence augmented by human beings…the two combine, but we’re going to move from a world where 80 percent of the work is being done by humans and 20 percent is begin done by machines to a world where 80 percent of the work is done by machines and 20 percent of the work is done by humans…

(10:14) Do you think that people are prepared for the investment involved?

BL: …are you going to be as a business investing heavily in your own capabilities of adopting and applying AI technologies so that you do? Who owns AI inside your company, who owns automation, and who’s going to be driving products that incorporate this other way of looking at things and solving problems?…There’s so many cooks in the kitchen on the inside is side in the corporations; on the other side, you have a lack of vision as to what these products and endpoint should be…

(12:50) What is the talent game for (those outside of Silicon Valley)…what does it look like for the folks who aren’t in the Bay?

BL: …when I think about these dynamics, if you were to be a startup in France focusing on AI, you have a great local pool of talent and you’re not in as much aggressive competition with the local Googles and Facebooks and Amazons of the world that they want to suck up all the talent from these universities, so play that to your advantage. We only invest in companies in Silicon Valley (SV), but the founders can be from anywhere in the world, the company could have ben started elsewhere, which means that we’re completely in favor of you maintaining an R&D somewhere in the place where you come from, where you speak the language, where you know the universities….

(18:35) What do companies do to start to grasp what is possible, see how they could be disrupted, where the opportunities lie?

BL: As a venture capitalist, we’re in a very unique, privileged position…we are educated constantly so we see patterns that are very interesting; my advice would be, talk to people who are in the business to get smarter and wiser, not just by reading things…but you need to talk to people that are on the front lines, who are doing it, you need to potentially be a corporation investing in (venture) funds as well…

…people should be using budgets to actually learn, you should be thinking where can we allocate money…you might actually get closer to people who organize that (sponsored) event and have incredible access, you could be working with incubators and accelerators…there’s a few different tools that corporations have that are accessible to them.

Big Ideas:

1 – People are not buying AI as a company, they’re buying results – a return on investment. AI shouldn’t be looked on as a “neat” thing, but something that has requirements, costs, and results, with a need for smart business decisions, the same as any valuable business tool.

2 – SV doesn’t necessarily have more talent, it just has more resources that allow companies to scale. AI and ML companies can and should get started and grow outside the SV ecosystem. The reason BootstrapLabs wants those companies to eventually have a presence in SV is the ability to scale ideas and ROI; returns are driven by acquisitions, and most of those willing to pay for these technologies are in SV.

Job Automation Predictions from 2016 Silicon Valley Survey

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This article was originally published on http://techemergence.com/ and it`s the result of a collaboration between BootstrapLabs and Techemergence.

Job automation predictions from an individual expert typically draw from years of academic research experience, or time “in the trenches” of industry. With growing interest and speculation on the job market of the next decade, we set out to garner a perspective as to what Silicon Valley thinks about the possibilities of automations in various business tasks.

We wanted to know – what work functions have the most potential for near-term automation?

In the infographics and article below, we explore the survey responses from nearly 80 Bay Area investors, founders, and tech folks – on which business functions have the greatest potential for automation today, and in the coming five years ahead.

Together with San Fransisco-based venture firm BootstrapLabs, we designed a simple survey that was handed out during their “Autonomous Corporation” event in November 2016. Below are the responses to this survey, and our interpretations and gleaned ideas:

bootstraplabs-automated-corporation

Automation Predictions – Current

It is interesting to note all three groups of respondents considered business intelligence to be the business function with the most current automation potential.

Similarly, investors, founders, and “other” respondents were also unanimous in ranking human resources as the business function with the least current automation potential. It seems plausible that job automation in the HR department is less likely than the BI department, and that the predictions of our respondents would reflect this.

A uniform response for “highs” and “lows” was not expected, and seems to signal that there is strong shared sentiment around those two particular business functions.

While there seemed to be relative consensus around business intelligence, human resources, and marketing, other business functions – such as security and finance – didn’t have the same uniform optimism or pessimism across respondent groups.

Automation Predictions – 5 Years Out

It seemed highly unlikely from the outset, but one major trend resounded from the “Current” survey section to the responses in the “5 Year Future” section: Business intelligence again ranked highest amongst all options by all three groups, and human resources again ranked dead last for all three groups as well.

Based on the survey size (78 respondents, about one third investors, one third founders, one third “other”), this is by no means conclusive. There are no “conclusive” predictions in the first place (good startup idea though, someone should work on that). Rather, this seems

Manufacturing stands out as a major outlier from “current” to “5 years out.” Ranked among the lowest areas of current automation, manufacturing jumped ahead to nearly overtake business intelligence for the area of most optimism in the coming five years. It is possible that this is due to the heavier hard-cost investment of industrial manufacturing processes as compared to domains like business intelligence, marketing, of finance – where “automation” never has to reach it’s robot arms into the real world.

It is interesting to note that the current industry trends in funding AI and machine learning doesn’t seem to provide much evidence for heavy investment in manufacturing, so we might presume that the optimism of the investors and founders in the crowd spawned from another source.

Read more at: http://techemergence.com/job-automation-predictions-silicon-valley-survey/

The Autonomous Corporation presented by BootstrapLabs

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Thank you to the Autonomous Corporation attendees!

 

We hope that you found the conference informative and enjoyed the networking during the event.

Seeing all of you hanging out until the end of the event made our team proud of their work and strongly encouraged us to keep working hard evangelizing AI around the world.

 

At BootstrapLabs, we believe that innovation and progress will happen at an accelerated pace in all corners of the globe, and that bringing people together around their shared passion for AI will drive positive impact in our world!

 

As many of you have been asking, we would like to officially announce that we have started working on next year’s Applied AI Conference 2017 (Check out the Applied AI Conference 2016 here) and will soon share more information about date, location and speakers line-up.

 

Below you can find some social media posts about the Autonomous Corporation event:

Announcing The Autonomous Corporation

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The Autonomous Corporation

We stand in front of the 4th and largest wave of the industrial revolution, powered by AI and Data. This is the biggest opportunity so far for innovation and entrepreneurship, and every single industry will be disrupted and redefined by companies that are not yet even born.

With the AI market projected to grow over 20 fold in the next 10 years to $3Tn annually, we believe Applied Artificial Intelligence represents one of the major wealth creation opportunities of this century.

Any system that is not learning will soon die, and applying AI to new or existing systems will extend and accelerate societal improvement.

AI-driven systems will soon be able to build better, more efficient products that scale and solve problems in ways that have not been possible before. While everyone is talking about Autonomous Vehicles, we want to talk to you about the Autonomous Corporation, where most actions will be automated, decisions autonomously taken and where outcome will be learned from to continuously improve results. We are moving away from the world of Automated Systems and stepping into a world of Autonomous Systems.

 

The power of AI is about leveraging technology and big data, automating repetitive mechanical tasks, capturing more data from the real world, and ultimately empowering humans with actionable intelligence, rather than replacing them, and finally changing our world for the better!

Join us @ BootstrapLabs HQ for an exciting evening with the leaders of the Autonomous Revolution!

RSVP NOW

Space is very limited and we expect to reach full capacity quickly.

AGENDA

17:45 – 18:15: Registration
18:20 – 18:25: Welcome message
18:20 – 19:00: “The Autonomous Corporation” Keynote and Fireside Chat

  • Dr. Danny B. Lange, Head of Machine Learning at Uber
  • Ben Levy, Co-Founder at BootstrapLabs

19:00 – 20:00: “Enabling The Autonomous Corporation: AI Founders Insights”

  • Sabrina N. Atienza, Founder at Qurious.io
  • Alex Holub, Co-Founder at Vidora
  • Cathrine Andersen, Co-Founder at Roger.ai

20:00 – 20:30: “Drinks & Networking”

Meet speakers and companies presenting:

 

uber-bootstraplabs

Keynote: Dr. Danny B. Lange, Head of Machine Learning at Uber
Moderator: Ben Levy, Co-Founder, BootstrapLabs

19:00 “Enabling The Autonomous Corporation: AI Founders Insights”

Autonomous Corporations AI Leaders Insights

Sabrina N. Atienza, Founder at Qurious.io

Alex Holub, Co-Founder at Vidora

Cathrine Andersen, Co-Founder at Roger.ai

See you on November 15th!

BootstrapLabs Autonomous Corporations

Announcing AI PitchForce. Apply now!

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ai-pitchforce-startups-vc-bootstraplabs

Presented by BootstrapLabs and PeopleConnect, AI Pitchforce is a can’t-miss opportunity for AI startup entrepreneurs to present to top angel investors and VCs. It will take place August 25th from 5:00-8:30 PM at Reed Smith, 101 2nd Street, San Francisco.

The AI PitchForce judges will be:

Companies presenting can expect the following:

  • A demo table on the show floor
  • Multiple networking opportunities with guests and investors
  • An opportunity to earn $500K – $1.5M in seed funding
  • The opportunity to present in front a panel of distinguished investors

Event Format:

During the demo period in the first hour, guests and investors will be able to vote on their favorite five companies. These companies will be granted a 4 minute pitch to the panel, followed by a 4 minute Q&A session and 4 minutes of feedback from the panel. The bottom companies will then be allowed a one minute elevator pitch to the panel. From these companies, one will be chosen to have a full 4 minute pitch in front of the panel. The winner will then be selected by the panel and receive a meeting with BootstrapLabs, a meeting with Javelin Venture Partners and a $1,500 scholarship to the Keiretsu Forum Capital Access Series.

Here’s how to apply:

Rules: Any early stage company specializing in AI or Applied AI may apply

Cost: Totally Free!

Email your Executive Summary and pitch deck to info@bootstraplabs.com to apply.

Guests interested in attending can purchase tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-pitchforce-tickets-26669745928

Thank you to our sponsor

GEP_Text_Icon_Horizontal

AI IS EATING THE WORLD

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Press Release: The Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference 2016

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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA (PRWEB) MAY 25, 2016

The annual BootstrapLabs Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference will take place on Wednesday May 25th in San Francisco.

This year’s conference will focus on AI’s disruptive power and its impact on Society, the Enterprise, and People. The conference has a packed house of 400+ attendees and features 43 thought leaders in AI from companies like AirBnb, Accenture, Amazon, BMW, Facebook, IBM, NASA, Sentient, Singularity University, Stanford University, Uber and more.

The conference sessions include keynotes and panels on some of the most relevant topics in the AI space, including:

● Exponential Disruption with Rob Nail, CEO & Associate Founder, Singularity University
● Bring Machine Learning to every corner of your Organization with Danny Lange, Head of Machine Learning, Uber
● Ingredients for Successful AI Platforms , with Hussein Mehanna, Director, Core Machine Learning, Facebook
● Innovation and Inspiration through Cognitive Computing with Swami Chandrasekaran, Chief Technologist, IBM Watson
● Fully Autonomous Agents – The Next Big Thing in AI with Nigel Duffy, CTO, Sentient
● Autonomous Transportation and Mobility ­Uwe Higgen, Head Technology USA, BMW
● Meet Amy, your new Personal Assistant with Josh Constine, Editor­At­Large, TechCrunch, and Dennis R. Mortensen, Founder & CEO, x.ai
● Chatbots in the Physical World with Jack Clark, Reporter, Bloomberg and Oren Jacob, Co­Founder & CEO, PullString

Why AI is changing everything?
Artificial Intelligence is not new, but the underlying technologies have reached an inflection point. AI is entering a commercialization phase and every product and industry sector is being reimagined using an AI­ first approach. BootstrapLabs believes this will drive an accelerated pace of innovation in most industry verticals across the globe.

“We have entered the age of Applied AI, and as an investor at the forefront of this industry, we wanted to bring together our friends from Facebook, Uber, Amazon, IBM, Airbnb, NASA, BMW, Department of Homeland Security, Singularity University, Stanford, and so many others to join us for a special conversation on the s tate of things in Applied AI and where we are headed,,” said Nicolai Wadstrom, CEO of BootstrapLabs.

Follow this link to view the conference agenda and full speakers list – http://hackers.ai/applied-artificial-intelligence-conference/speakers/

About BootstrapLabs
BootstrapLabs is a Silicon Valley based Venture Builder Company with a global outlook on innovation, combining Human Capital with Venture Capital to invest in Applied Artificial Intelligence startups leveraging Big Data.
BootstrapLabs’ investment platform stands on three core pillars: Venture Capital, Human Capital, and a Community of founders, makers and thought leaders. Founded and operated by entrepreneurs, BootstrapLabs understands firsthand the needs and challenges of building a startup, and invests early in passionate founders who are building potentially disruptive technology companies with global potential.

BootstrapLabs’ current seed fund invests in innovative and smart AI­powered software platforms that create significant value for their users in large, global markets. Key sectors of interest include Internet of Things, FinTech, Future of Work, Logistics, Security, eHealth, and others.

Since its inception, BootstrapLabs has invested and worked with startups such as Prezi, Trusted Insight, AngelList, Aeye, and Zerply.

Contacts
BootstrapLabs
Press inquiries Email: info(at)bootstraplabs(dot)com
Webiste: http://www.bootstraplabs.com
Twitter: @Bootstraplabs
Applied AI Conference hashtag: #AAI16

More articles about the Applied AI Conference:

Facebook spares humans by fighting offensive photos with AI

Are High Stress Decisions Best Made by Bots?

Facebook’s machine learning director shares tips for building a successful AI platform

New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

UBER’s Head of Machine Learning Thinks You Might be Doing it Wrong

How is AI changing the enterprise?

When Artificial Intelligence Meets Reality

Are High Stress Decisions Best Made by Bots?

Oracle Inspiration Tour 2015: a morning with BootstrapLabs

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As part of Oracle OpenWorld 2015 this week, Oracle France organized a 5 day “inspiration” tour of San Francisco/Silicon Valley for about 30 French corporate executives. After visiting some of our friends at LinkedIn, Lending Club, and Uber, the group spent Tuesday morning with BootstrapLabs at our San Francisco offices.

Ben_Oracle_InspSettled in with coffee and pastries, the group met with Ben Levy, BootstrapLabs co-founder, who spoke of his journey as an entrepreneur, our work at BootstrapLabs, and the economic impact of venture capital, and the unique role that Silicon Valley plays in terms of innovation, disruption and growth.

Ben2_Oracle_Insp

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oracle_inspThe executives from Alcatel-Lucent, Kering, Lafarge, Ubisoft, Société General, and other top French firms, had plenty of questions about how the changes we see here in Silicon Valley will affect the large corporations they run, with concerns about mobile apps, SaaS, financial systems and customer relations leading the way. Ben shared some facts and figures, as well as concrete examples of why collaborating, innovating and adapting to the changes that we see firsthand here in Silicon Valley are crucial to global companies.

 

As the event concluded with presentations from five startups that are working in the areas of transit, retail, collaboration, marketing, and sales, our visitors left to continue their tour and gather more inspiration.

Oworld2015

AngelList: The World’s First On Demand VC-as-a-Service Platform

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beGobal Panel with Kevin Laws1

[Disclaimer: BootstrapLabs is an investor in AngelList and we have two syndicates, BootstrapLabs Syndicate and BootstrapLabs A+ Syndicate with Gil Penchina]

Last week I had the good fortune to find myself interviewing Kevin Laws, the COO of AngelList just a few days after they had launched a series of announcements that sent tremors through the entire startup and venture investment ecosystems:

  • Launched CSC Upshot: a new $400M seed fund dedicated mostly to early stage startups and syndicated deals on AngelList; which comes in addition to the existing Maiden Lane’s $25M fund launched in April 2014
  • Opened-up its backend infrastructure to offer “SPV as a Service” for angels and VCs interested in capturing pro-rata and/or additional carry on their best deals, across stages
  • Pushed its iOS App for its “joblist” marketplace

First of all, let’s briefly cover what came out of my fireside chat:

BL_KL_beGlobal_2015

  • AngelList is trying hard to stay in love with the problem they set out to solve when they first launched: “How do we help founders (globally) focus on what matters most, which is building their company and products, and spend less time fundraising?” You can sense that they have made this problem a core value at AngelList.
  • We argued that cross-border angel investing would not be possible without online platforms like AngelList, bringing both sides together (founders and angels), yet maybe more importantly without a trust & expertise based syndication model that aligns everyone’s interest, removes significant friction in the decision process (“emotional friction”) and ultimately building technology and processes to close the transactions (“physical friction”). Among the new stats shared by Kevin during our talk, he said that 10% of the capital invested online on AngelList was from outside Silicon Valley, while only 3% of completed fundraising online was for companies outside of the US. The new fund will definitely give a huge boost to the foreign capital percentage number above, unless they classify it as a US fund, event though it is backed 100% by Chinese capital.
  • Kevin placed the number of startups on AngelList at approximately 300,000 with  30,000 or 10% of them being in fundraising mode at any one time. In one sense, the odds of being “discovered” on AngelList are much better than they were in the Apple Store as of June 2015. There were over 1.5M apps, but the syndication of your round by a well known angel investor in Silicon Valley remains your best shot to stand out (kind of your equivalent to being featured by “Apple” in the store). The interesting bit for me was that this was still holding true for foreign companies trying to fundraise on AngelList. Kevin used the example of Descomplica, a Brazilian online education startup that raised $5M in February 2014 from Social+Capital, and used a syndicate led by my friend Lee Jacobs, a local angel investor with ties to Brazil, to ignite the fundraising on AngelList. Lee was also the very first to do a syndicate on AngelList so he gets pioneers’ points in my book :). Kevin also makes a very important point on the video below…you can invest anywhere but you might not be able to get your money back everywhere! Let us not forget that over 80% of technology M&A deals happen in Silicon Valley (buyer or seller is located there) and the last time I checked, corporate sales were responsible for 95% of the return of capital for VCs.

You can find a “meerkat” version of the interview here for now and I will upload a professional version from beGlobal as soon as it becomes available.

Now on with my two cents on their recent announcements:

CSC UPSHOT FUND

Some dubbed it the world’s largest seed fund and it sure is an impressive amount, but read the fine print. You realize that the investment thesis is broader…you are talking about investing in top startups (based on their metrics and syndicate leads) not just in Silicon Valley, but globally with the ability to do pro-rata and access later stage opportunities too (which are now facilitated even further due to their new SPV product). As I mentioned on stage, it takes a “Chinese billionaire” to have the humility to say “I do not have access to Silicon Valley deal flow, nor may I have the skills to vet it, but I sure can get some of the smartest people in the business to discover, vet, and syndicate some of their best deals for me, as well as secure access to follow-on funding via pro-rata rights and SPVs.” I am convinced that many institutions and family offices that invest in venture have been asking themselves why they did not think of it before, how maybe they just needed a lead to follow.

 

FREE ONLINE SPVs FOR ANGELS & VCs SYNDICATING LATER STAGE ROUNDS

This part did not grab the headlines, but this is probably the submerged part of the iceberg in my own opinion. By opening up its backend infrastructure and making these online SPVs free for Angels and VCs ($10K admin fee is spread among the LPs and AngelList does not charge any carry), AngelList is getting 3 very significant benefits:

  • they are getting all the LP contacts
  • they are accelerating the growth of their funds under management, and  
  • last but not least, they are capturing performance and return data at the source

This is by far the most significant announcement AngelList made that day for the future of AngelList.


“JOBLIST” iOS APP

If fundraising is among the top pain point of founders, recruiting talent is probably way up there as well, so it is only natural that AngelList spends a significant amount of time and capital improving its job marketplace product. It will also over time become a very strong competitive advantage and barrier to entry as “startup” skills and know-how are in very high demand across the world. There is also a very natural and synergistic relationship between fundraising and hiring since most $ startups raise goes to hiring more talent!

At BootstrapLabs we ask all our portfolio companies to create and maintain an up to date AngelList profile as a way of communicating with their stakeholders, including future employees.

Thank you to Kevin and the team at beGlobal for providing me with the opportunity!

So long and happy investing.

 

Presentation used by AngelList for their PR announcement

 

About Ben Levy

Twitter | LinkedIn

BL ProfileBen is the co-founder of BootstrapLabs, a Venture Investment Company that invests capital, experience, and skills into disruptive software companies from around the world, and helps their founders relocate to Silicon Valley to build BIG. Born in France and living in Silicon Valley for the past 17 years, Ben is a repeat entrepreneur who launched, built, and exited two startups in the financial technology space, one to Mergent, and another one to SecondMarket, who was recently acquired by NASDAQ.

He has also helped founders raise over $300M of capital from Venture Capitalists and Private Equity Investors and closed $5B worth of technology M&A transactions as an investment banker earlier in his career. He is a frequent speaker on innovation, investing, technology, entrepreneurship and globalization.

 

BootstrapLabs at Innovation Skåne – Advice for Swedish entrepreneurs

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nicolai_lund

Lund, Sweden | Wednesday 21 October 2015

In a room full of entrepreneurs, BootstrapLabs founder Nicolai Wadström shared his thoughts on Silicon Valley unicorns, and the speculation of tech bubbles and overvalued startups. He reminded his audience to focus on value, and the fundamentals of the companies being touted as Unicorns.

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Event with Connect Angel Network in Malmo at Minc: Unicorn Factory/Leveraging Silicon Valley

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ConnectNicolai Wadstrom, Founder and CEO of BootstrapLabs will share with Swedish entrepreneurs, local angels and the Connect Angel Network and Minc community his journey with BootstrapLabs.

mincAttendees will also receive valuable insights and learn how companies like Prezi scale from a small office in Budapest to a 300+ people company in Silicon Valley.

A guaranteed dose of inspiration will be provided to all the attendees!

Prezi Presentation from the Event

PICTURES FROM THE EVENT

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SPEAKER

Nicolai Wadstrom Founder & CEOBootstrapLabsNicolai Wadstrom, Founder & CEO of BootstrapLabs

Twitter | Linkedin

Nicolai Wadstrom, a serial entrepreneur turned parallell entrepreneur as the founder of BootstrapLabs, a Global Venture Capital firm based in Silicon Valley. Nicolai advises all portfolio startups in their day to day operations, connecting founders with industry experts, advisors and investors to increase their likelihood of success, assisting with product design and development, positioning, go-to-market strategy and implementation, partnerships and fundraising.

Multiple time Startup CEO, CTO. Raised capital from Angels, Private Equity, Investment Banks and VC’s. Angel investor and adviser to Internet, Software, Mobile and Digital Media startups in Europe and Silicon Valley, including BootstrapLabs portfolio companies such as Prezi, Zerply, Audiodraft and Witsbits. Nicolai has been writing code since he was 10 years old, and still speaks Java fluently. He is very focused on product and technology development within the Big Data, Analytics, Internet, Mobile and Software/Cloud sectors. Nicolai is a frequent guest speaker, mentor and judge at Universities and Conferences in the US and Europe.

Startup BD: Hacking The Strategic Partnership

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On February 20th, 5:30 pm, San Francisco

Startup BD is about growing your company by doing deals.

Experts from Facebook, Pinterest, Klout, Spotify, DocuSign, Foundersuite, Automattic (WordPress), MessageMe and more will talk about how to use strategic partnerships, APIs, and platforms to fuel growth. We will also cover best practice, tips for doing deals, and pitfalls to avoid.

Come join us early, stay late, join the fun.

Sign-up at www.startupbd.com

Use code BSL25 to get a discount.