Tech in Motion: San Francisco kicked off 2014 with one of their biggest and most successful events to date.
They hosted their first ever panel discussion ‘Startup to Success’ at the awesome StartupHouse in the hub of tech innovation in the city’s SoMa district.
StartupHouse offers an open plan co-working space for entrepreneurs and their teams. They have a cool, open space on the ground level where attendees enjoyed some refreshments, snacks, and networking before settling down to learn more about the star panel. StartupHouse was the perfect venue for a Tech in Motion meetup, especially with January’s startup theme and their involvement with incubators and accelerators bringing entrepreneurs to San Francisco.
In this stellar panel, not only did we welcome back some old favorites from meetups past, we also had some fresh new faces on our panel sharing stories about their startups. The amazing Perri Blake Gorman, CEO and Founder of Archive.ly moderated the panel and being the pro that she is, really delved into the interesting differences between each panelist from funding to hiring to going international with your company.
Jakob Storm, COO and Co-Founder of CrowdCuirty talked about how he and his team brought their idea from Denmark to the Bay Area. While it is a natural progression to move to the tech hub of the world, it was interesting to see how their process had differences having moved from Denmark to Buenos Aires to the Bay.
Scott Bedard, CTO and Co-Founder of thisMoment, offered a great depth of experience having been at Yahoo! and CNET previous to his most recent role. Perri talked to Scott about how he built his team to 15+ engineers and how this team evolved with the growth that thisMoment experienced.
We also heard from Kieran Farr, CEO and Co-Founder at Vidcaster, the market-leading video training and marketing platform with global clients such as VMware, MIT and Dell. Kieran’s backstory was really interesting as Vidcaster started out as a consumer platform. Having built their business idea upon this, they realized that if Vidcaster was going to be profitable they would have to focus on B2B customers.
Last but especially not least, Poornima Vijayashanker represented the ladies on our panel. Poornima is a role model for women in the often male dominated tech industry. She started out in the startup world as founding engineer at Mint.com, and from there founded Bizabee and Femgineer. Femgineer provides education services to tech professionals and tech entrepreneurs. It was really interesting to listen to Poornima talk about funding and the difference between being a part of two companies – one VC funded and one bootstrapped and the challenges each can bring.
The ‘Startup to Success’ Panel was definitely one of Tech in Motion San Francisco’s most interesting events. Thank you to our awesome members and we hope to see you all next month!