NEWS

Cloud file storage company Dropbox was just named "Best Overall Startup" at the Crunchies. Come hear founder Drew Houston talk about the journey from founding in 2007 to Dropbox's recent $4B valuation, and what's next. (Note: RCs will do the Dropbox case on 2/6.)

Please pre-submit questions for Drew here.

Event details
February 7
3:30-4:45 PM
Spangler Auditorium
This event is open to the entire Harvard community.

We'll be kicking off Fall with both Wayfair (FKA CSN Stores) co-founders, Niraj Shah & Steven Conine, of the $500+ million home goods online retailer.  Come join us to learn about how Niraj & Steve bootstrapped the second largest online housewares and home furnishings retailer in the US today with over 3 million items from 5,000 brands and until this year had no venture capital investors.

Wayfair employs over 800 people in the US, Canada, Germany, UK, Ireland, and Australia, and goes to market using a number of brands including Wayfair.com, All Modern, Joss & Main.

This will mark the first time that Founder Dialogues invites two founders to speak candidly of their path to success.  Moderator Eric Paley sees this as a unique opportunity to dive into the important co-founder relationship that is crucial to building a company. 

Prior to Wayfair, Niraj and Steve co-founded Simplify Mobile, an enterprise software company focused on mobile device management, which was sold to Tangoe, and Spinners, an Internet consultancy, which was sold to iXL. At iXL, Niraj was the COO and a board member, and Steve ran the operations in the United Kingdom.

We look forward to hearing Niraj and Steve's story and believe it will continue our series of inspiring Boston entrepreneurial success stories from home.

HubSpot was on-campus recently to share an intro to inbound marketing and offer Harvard student entrepreneurs a free trial of their wildly popular service.

Here's the presentation: Hubspot HBS Presentation
Here's a basic guide to internet marketing: Essential Guide

And here is where you can get access to your free trial: Free Trial

For those who sign up for the free trial, please join us in the i-lab on November 10th and 17th at 5:30 for workshops on how to get the most from your trial and office hours where you can get answers to your specific questions.

Last year, we organized 3x3 Dinners grouping 3 tech and 3 biz entrepreneurial students. We’re taking it to the next level this semester. The next round – starting next Thursday, October 13 at 6:30 pm - is particularly special as it’ll be taking place at the new Harvard Innovation Lab and will be sponsored by North Bridge Venture Partners. We’re catering dinner to the i-lab. We’re changing the name to Startup Suppers as it’ll be a truly pan Harvard affair now.

To sign up, please go to http://bit.ly/startupsuppers and fill out the form as soon as you can. Almost everyone was very qualified last year, so we’ll partly be allocating groups on a first come first serve basis, while maintaining representative ratios for each group. Please feel free to forward to friends who you think will also be good fits.

Brought to you by:

Location: Aldrich 007

Roger Dickey (Angel Investor and former GM of Zynga), Taso Du Val (CEO of TopTal) and Andrew Masanto and Gael Breton (Directors at Higher Click SEO Company) and will be sharing their knowledge on “Cornerstones of Online business: Social Media, SEO and Hiring Smart”.

If you have ever had an aspiration to start or lead a web based business, or if you simply want a better understanding of how to enhance the internet or web presence for a bricks and mortar business, this is a talk not to miss.

Details of the talk topics and the individual speakers are below:

Roger Dickey

Roger Dickey is a serial entrepreneur & angel investor. Roger’s first company was an Airbnb for tutoring, started in Austin in 2006. His foray into the game industry began in 2007, when he started a facebook app company and worked quickly, building 19 apps with the largest game driving over 10M daily pageviews. Within 8 months, this startup was bought by Zynga, and Roger went on to found Mafia Wars which reached 45.5M users by 2010. He also founded FishVille and 5 other titles in his 3 years at Zynga. Lastly, Roger served as an international product team advisor for Zynga, helping the company grow their games in India, Japan and China. Since leaving Zynga he has started a new company in San Francisco.

Alongside his work at Zynga, Roger began angel investing and advising startups in June 2010. His investments include Facebook, Addepar, DotCloud, E La Carte, Internmatch, HiGear, Ecomom, Speakertext, Wanderfly and more.

Roger will be speaking on the topic of “How to de-risk your startup”.

Taso Du Val

As an early and lead engineer at Fotolog (Acquired by Hi-Media for $100m), Slide (Acquired by Google for $228m), and his own companies, Taso has had a wealth of experience in hiring top tech, management and engineering talent. His most recent business – TopTal brings this ability to hire to the forefront of innovative businesses all over the world. While running a small engineering consulting firm, Taso recognized that while many of his co-workers overseas were just as good as his friends and colleagues at Google, Facebook, and other companies with notable top engineering talent, it was simply impossible to find more of them. TopTal was thus created as a solution to the sky-rocketing demand for top engineers in Silicon Valley, US, and Europe despite the shrinking local graduation rates of such engineers.

Taso will be discussing the ins and outs of hiring tech talent for your business – be that start up or international conglomerate.  He’ll also touch upon the different types of entrepreneurial routes one can take and what sort of lifestyles they lead to.

Andrew Masanto and Gael Breton

Andrew Masanto and Gael Breton are co-founders of Higher Click. Andrew and Gael successfully founded and ran several online companies, including Height Increasing Altitude Shoes, the UK’s largest online retailer of mens Elevator Shoes. The success of their businesses came from SEO and PPC work, which led to their current SEO Company – Higher Click. Many of their companies and clients (which include the likes of Atari.com, Flippa.com and others) now rank at the top of Google for competitive keywords.

Andrew and Gael will be talking about Search Engine Optimisation and getting the most out of your website.

Email Alice Moses, amoses@hbs.edu, to sign up (limited to 20). Please only request a spot if you’re sure you can make it.

Interested in getting a job at a tech start-up, but don't have a tech background? Join this Brown Bag lunch with HBS alum RD Huffstetler, and hear how he did it.

For more info:

Bio: RD Huffstetler is a 2010 graduate of HBS/HKS with a joint MBA/MPA, where he was a Zuckerman Fellow. Prior to graduate school, he was a U.S. Marine and served in Afghanistan & Iraq. Originally from Newnan, GA, he now lives in the Bay Area and works for Twilio, a cloud communications startup. Like everyone in technology, he has a blog that only he and his relatives read: http://www.rdhjr.com. 

Twilio provides a series of API's that make it easy for any web developer to build applications to send & receive calls and text messages. Some of our best known customers include eBay, Hulu, and intuit, along a range of use cases like automated calls, contact center, and identify verification. Twilio is backed by Union Square Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners

What do Jim Coulter, James Carville, Google, start-up businesses, Cajun food and Jazz music have in common?  YOU can experience them all during your 2012 Spring Break!

Join the HBS Entrepreneurship Club on Monday, October 3rd at 6:30pm in Aldrich 107 to learn about New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (NOEW), a weeklong festival of entrepreneurship, hosted by The Idea Village, and coinciding for the first time with our Spring Break in 2012.

Join us for Naked Pizza (a 2009 NOEW alum) and learn about the opportunity to engage with MBA students from top schools, corporate volunteers (Google, Cisco, Salesforce), investors (Jim Coulter, TPG), New Orleans leaders (America’s “Odd Couple” – James Carville/Mary Matalin, Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson) in a weeklong entrepreneurship experience.

Why participate in New Orleans Entrepreneur Week?

• Join a high-impact entrepreneur as part of the start-up team and gain firsthand experience on the front lines of entrepreneurship.
• Network with HBS classmates – and entrepreneurial peers nationwide. Develop lasting friendships, future business partners, investors, and customers.
• Enjoy unique New Orleans flair – crawfish boil, jazz music, second line, and more.
• Your Spring Break tan will quickly fade but your entrepreneurial experiences and memories will last a lifetime.

On October 3rd, The Idea Village is joining us at HBS to share additional details and the exciting line up for NOEW ‘12. 

We look forward to bringing an all-star team to show New Orleans (and the world) what entrepreneurship at HBS is all about!

Msnbc.com, in conjunction with Lexus, is hosting a contest about engineering a better tomorrow. Engineering a better future starts with asking a better question. So the entry will be prompted with “What If?” followed by an idea explained in 365 characters or less.  Ideas must not be related to automobiles or the automotive industry.

Examples include:

What if you could create a merry-go-round for children that powers electricity for a village?

What if you could take old advertising billboards and turn them into disaster-relief shelters?

 

Judging criteria will include:

• Originality of thought and innovative unique nature
• Practical, realistically implementable idea for a better tomorrow
• Potential ability to execute proposed use based on written statement

 

Prizes include:

• 3 day/2 night all expenses paid round trip to LA from February 3 – February 5 to attend a Startup Weekend event
• A new camera and access to the Startup Weekend blog to gain exposure in the startup community and document experience
• Additional personal mentorship hours with Angel Investors and notable CEOs in the Entrepreneurial and Technology industry (i.e. CEO of BetterWorks; CTO and CEO of MySpace; CEO of Shopzilla and Bizrate)

 

Why this is fantastic for you:

With commitments to classes and time consuming homework, the submission requires plenty of thought, but little effort to enter. With several amazing programs already set up in the school to foster such What If? thoughts (e.g. the Entrepreneurship Business Plan Contest), this is just another avenue to gain exposure and additional funding for the you ideas.

Startup Weekends are “54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers, and startup enthusiast come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups.”

An example of a successful business that came out of LA’s Startup Weekend last February is Zaarly, who has received funding from Felicis Ventures, Lightbank, Ashton Kutcher, Paul Buchheit, Bill Lee, Naval Ravikant, and Michael Arrington.

This is a great opportunity for you to get their idea seen by some big names and learn a few things about turning your idea into reality along the way. The contest website is whatifintowhatis.com and entry submissions will be accepted until October 13^th.   

Aldrich 007

David Stewart - VP of Platform, Partnerships, and Marketing at Yammer will speak about marketing a startup product to fortune 500 companies. He will also discuss MBA roles in the tech startup industry.

Yammer is changing internal corporate communications by bringing together all of a company's employees inside a private and secure enterprise social network. Yammer has over 80% of the fortune 500 companies using it and just reached 3 million users

Please sign up here: http://bit.ly/r5UYqS if you are interested in having drinks/hors d’oeuvres with David after the event. This will be first come, first serve.