Early Stage Funding 24 - Dec - 2009

MentorSquare, Presents A Unique Breakfast Workshop on: Early Stage Funding

The question of early stage funding is still not a widely known and understood area in the entrepreneurship. There is a fairly low understanding of the objectives, expectations and methodologies practiced by Seed and Angel Fund houses within the community. As such, you will benefit from learning about how these genres operate, and the differences between them and other investment house genres. Who are the significant players in this segment, and some case studies of both successful as well as not-so-successful seed and/or angel-funded start-ups.

Keynote Speaker:

Nazrin Hassan: CEO, CRADLE Fund Sdn. Bhd. Malaysia Nazrin began his career as a Corporate Finance Executive in CIMB where he specialised in equity issues and debt restructuring work. After 3 years with CIMB, he left to begin his stint in entrepreneurship within the ZAR Group. In 2001, Nazrin won 3rd place in the Venture 2001 National Business Plan Competition for high technology ventures. Nazrin was also invited to head the Funding & Finance Sub-Committee of Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM). While in TeAM, Nazrin spearheaded the lobbying for developmental funding to the Malaysian government.

In 2003 Cradle Investment Programme (CIP) was formed and Nazrin was appointed as the Head of the Structuring team in CIP before he was appointed as the Acting Head and Strategy and Policy Advisor for CIP. He left CIP in 2004 to continue with his own technology business ventures, with his last position being Deputy CEO and Director of Smart Convergence Sdn Bhd. Despite leaving Cradle for several years, Nazrin was still actively involved within the ICT circles by remaining as the policy advisor in TeAM. He was also the Executive Director in TeAM during 2007. Nazrin is currently acting as the CEO of Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd.being appointed by the Ministry of Finance.

Our Panelists:

Indus Khaitan: General Partner, Morpheus Venture Partners, Bangalore

Indus has broad range of hands-on experience in starting companies, product development, technology evangelism, and marketing & sales. He started Tejit, Inc., a semantic web discovery engine which was later acquired. Prior to Morpheus, Indus was the CTO of SezWho Inc., a Los Altos, CA based social media infrastructure tools startup. Indus has held senior management & technology positions at Symantec, Outride (acquired by Google), Guru Worldwide, Mindware/NEC, VeriFone.Indus likes to dabble with web crawlers, distributed computing, search algos, enterprise software and always has a few pet projects breeding on his desktop. Indus has a BE in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology.

Ravi Narayan: CEO, MentorSquare Advisors Ltd. Bangalore

Seasoned Entrepreneur and Mentor in the IT and Telecom industry for more than 20 years. Ravi is the founder and Managing Director of Mentor Partners, one of the most successful early stage mentoring and venture fund in India. He brings several years of experience in the entrepreneurial world to help his portfolio companies achieve their maximum potential. Ravi, along with Mentor Partners, has incubated and operationalized MentorSquare. MentorSquare scales the model of Mentor Partners to several hundreds and thousands of entrepreneurs and businessmen around the world. He has Bachelors of Technology from IIT Madras, and MS in Industrial Engineering & MBA from University of Southern California. He is a founding member of PAN-IIT and charter member of the TiE organization.

Breakfast Workshop Details:

Date: Thursday, 24th December 2009
Venue: Hotel Monarch Luxur, # 67 Infantry Road, Bangalore - 560 001. (Route Map )
Ph: 25328253/ 25328250
Time: 08:30 AM to 11:30 AM
Registration Fee to be paid at the venue.
Activated/Paid Members of MentorSquare : Rs 300/-
Non-Paying Members : Rs 400/-

Agenda of the Day:

Time: 08:30am - 11.30am
08:30am - 09.00am : Breakfast and Registration
09.00am - 11:30am : Workshop
11:30am : Closing and Wrap Up