Executing Change
Great panel promoting women founders and capital allocators in the Batgirl Cave 🦇🏍💥 at Google in San Francisco!
I was joined on the panel by Laura Lucas, GP of L'ATTITUDE VENTURES, Joy Mbanugo, J.D., MAcc., CFO of CXAI (NASDAQ CXAI), Julie Castro Abrams, Managing Partner of How Women Invest/CEO How Women Lead, and Azin Radsan van Alebeek, Co-Founder and GP of Emmeline Ventures. Giselle Valdez Jackson, Executive Director in the Wells Fargo Tech Banking group was a terrific moderator as usual.
Topics discussed ranged from personal journeys as founders, operators, and investors to advice for everyone on the role they can play in facilitating and benefiting from a more inclusive economy.
CAN YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
For sure.
Columbia Venture Community in LA welcomes you!
Great turnout at Firestone Walker Brewing Company in Marina del Rey for happy hour of the SoCal Chapter of the Columbia Venture Community. It was a great opportunity for founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, and interested innovators to gather in a relaxed setting to socialize and build community.
Crowdsourcing Solutions for Humanity and the Planet: Columbia Does It Again!
Last Wednesday at Columbia, hardworking venture teams and early stage investors discussed humanitarian, social, and environmental problems, solutions, and scalable market opportunities to make the biggest impact. A Spring cohort of thirteen startup teams of talented students, researchers, faculty, and alumni in my impact venture incubator course competed for the top seven spots in round 1 judging to pitch live at Demo Day. They were joined by the top seven venture teams of the Fall cohort of sixteen startups. It was impressive to see the traction all of these early ventures have made.
In six weeks of programming, venture teams comprised of people from across Columbia University’s schools, programs, and alumni community validated problems with stakeholders, proposed solutions, created and iterated MVPs, derived go to market strategies, drafted pro forma financials, chose actionable performance metrics, and pitched their ventures to expert mentors and investors. The presentations of their business highlights were met with insightful questions from investors evaluating their offerings.
Our ventures span many sectors: climate impact/environmental sustainability, health and wellness, fintech, proptech/construction, edtech, civtech, safety wearables, journalism/new media, sustainable food, and DEI. Their offerings consist of software solutions, marketplaces, media platforms, and products.
Ready to Scale on the West Coast?
Last week I had the opportunity to lead a workshop on Customer Discovery and Validation at the newly launched Long Beach Accelerator.
Founders, now you have the opportunity to engage with the Long Beach Accelerator as the applications are now open for its second cohort to begin in the Summer of 2021. $75,000 to $100,000 of equity funding is offered backed by excellent programming (if I do say so myself), mentorship, municipal support, and corporate partnerships.