Mark your calendar! StrictlyVC's second and final INSIDER event of 2018 takes place Tuesday evening, September 25th, at the elegant third floor offices of Norwest Venture Partners at 2 South Park Street in San Francisco. If you want to mingle with some of the smartest operators in the tech-investing ecosystem and catch up with friends, you won't want to miss it.
FEATURED GUESTS:
1.) Juul founders Adam Bowen and James Monsees have quietly become among the most influential designers in the world, having created one of the first vaporizers (Ploom), a widely favored cannabis vaporizer (Pax), and now Juul, a nicotine vaporizer that is challenging companies like Philip Morris for supremacy in the multi-billion-dollar cigarette market.
We'll talk with them about their wild, 14-year ride, their design philosophy, and where they see the company heading. We'll also discuss the challenges and controversies they've been facing in navigating emerging regulatory hurdles.
2.) Ask anyone about the most disruptive force in Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry, and the answer is simple: it's SoftBank and its $93 billion Vision Fund, a vehicle that may well be one in a series.
We'll talk with Managing Director Jeff Housenbold and Investment Director Anna Lo about how they pick and choose what companies to fund, along with many other aspects of the Japanese conglomerate's strategy -- and its massive ripple effect throughout the venture industry.
3.) David Rogier is the cofounder and CEO of MasterClass, the immensely popular, four-year-old online class platform that has been able to snag a dizzying array of celebrity instructors, like cooking maestro Gordon Ramsay, ace tennis star Serena Williams, and famed director
Werner Herzog.
How did Rogier manage to create what has become the Netflix of e-learning? What's the company's greatest threat? And what's on MasterClass's road map? We'll talk with him about these issues and much more.
4.) Renée DiResta has spent years studying the growing magnitude of the disinformation problem — and what can be done about it, including as the head of policy for Data for Democracy, and more newly as the head of research for New Knowledge, a startup helps companies figure out why they're under attack. Congress has been listening to her; Bradley Tusk, the startup "fixer," investor, and longtime political strategist, will talk to DiResta about the upcoming midterm elections -- and what we might see happen.
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MUCH THANKS TO OUR GENEROUS SPONSORS
KCPR
A boutique public relations and strategy firm specializing in venture capital and startup clients founded by Silicon Valley publicist Kelsey Cullen.
MobSquad
Helping U.S.-based companies win the war for engineering talent by creating remote teams of high-caliber software engineers in Canada. (Engineers are "leased" to clients on an exclusive, long-term basis, effectively rendering them full-time employees.)
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TICKETS
The StrictlyVC INSIDER Series fee is $105 per person and includes access to the featured interviews, along with the following social gathering. Hope you can make it for a night of top-notch content, great networking, and delicious food!
This event is now sold out. You can join our waitlist here.
Norwest Venture Partners, the multi-stage venture firm with $7.5 billion under management -- it invests in consumer, enterprise, and healthcare companies -- is generously playing host for the evening. The firm recently moved into the top floor of a gorgeous building in San Francisco's South Park that also houses New Enterprise Associates and General Catalyst. It's also conveniently located next to a Blue Bottle Coffee. (Just remarking.)
A Pomona College grad who studied design at Stanford, Bowen began his career at Apple yet quickly graduated to creating world-changing products of his own, first by creating Ploom, then cofounding Pax Labs with Monsees, then creating, with Monsees again, the explosively popular if controversial Juul vaporizer.
Housenbold is a managing director with SoftBank Investment Advisers, where he is helping to lead its disruptive $100 billion Vision Fund. A board member of DoorDash, Wag Labs, Katerra, Grab, and Brandless, among others, Housenbold -- a Harvard MBA -- previously spent 11 years as the CEO of Shutterfly, among his other executive roles.
Lo, a Penn grad, joined SoftBank in 2006 after spending four years in tech banking at Deutsche Bank based in Hong Kong and Tokyo. She has since been been involved in international VC and portfolio management projects across Asia and North America, including as part of the founding team of SoftBank China & India Fund, an early-stage regional fund anchored by SoftBank, and today, as part of SoftBank Investment Advisors.
Rogier attended Washington University of St. Louis before working for Tesco and number of venture-backed startups. A Stanford MBA would more meaningfully change his path, in part because at Stanford, he met investor Michael Dearing, who he worked for after graduation. Dearing also became the first investor in MasterClass.
DiResta is the the Head of Policy at nonprofit Data for Democracy and she investigates the spread of disinformation across social networks, and assists policymakers in responding to the problem. DiResta, who has degrees in computer science and political science from the Honors College at SUNY Stony Brook, was also a 2017 Presidential Leadership Scholar and a Council on Foreign Relations term member.
Tusk is the founder of Tusk Ventures, which has gained a foothold in Silicon Valley by working closely with companies like Bird, Uber, and Tesla that are disrupting highly regulated industries. Tusk is also a longtime political strategist who was formerly Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager. He separately runs seven-year-old Tusk Strategies, which runs political-style media campaigns for a host of Fortune 500 companies.
Choksi is among the newest partners at Norwest Venture Partners, the multi-stage venture firm. Focused on internet and consumer deals, Choksi joined NVP from Facebook, where she held numerous executive roles across corporate development and business development over nine years. Before joining Facebook, the Penn (then Kellogg) grad spent six years at Google in strategic partnership roles.
McBride is a reporter with Bloomberg in San Francisco, covering venture capital and technology. Sarah joined Bloomberg in 2016 after spending more than five years with Reuters, where she also covered VC as well as election issues. She began her career with the Wall Street Journal, working in its L.A. and Hong Kong bureaus, writing on a wide range of issues, including digital entertainment.
Loizos is the founder of StrictlyVC, the news organization and event series. She got her start in Silicon Valley at the original Red Herring magazine in the late '90s and later worked for Time Inc., Dow Jones, Crain Communications, the San Jose Mercury News, and Reuters.
She is also the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch.
