This Week: October 7 – 13, 2012

Hi Café-goers! Did you stop by the Café last week and take advantage of our CIC legal office hours? Share your Café experiences with us here. This week we are excited to have this month’s Youth Cities mini hack. Come by and participate in the hack and join in other events on Thursday in the Café.

This week’s series of events features:

• MassVentures Office Hours
• The International Entrepreneurship Center Office Hours
• Youth-CITIES mini-hack
• InVenture Partners Office Hours
• Village Capital Info Table
• MIT Enterprise Forum – Community Circle
• Startup Weekend Info Table

3:00 – 8:00 P.M. Thursday, October 11, 2012 Venture Café in Session

4:00 – 5:30 P.M. MassVentures Office Hours

Stop by and chat with Jennifer Jordan, Vice President of MassVentures.  You can reserve a 15 minute segment by signing up at her table in the Café.

MassVentures’ goal is to meet potential funding candidates, whose companies are based in MA. If you would like to chat with the MassVentures partners, you should come with a high level pitch deck. It should cover at least:

a.) The problem you are addressing
b.) The size of the market
c.) The team
d.) The product offering
e.) The exit strategy

Click here for more information on MassVentures.

4:00 – 7:00 P.M. The International Entrepreneurship Center Office Hours

This Thursday stop by and chat with Jay Cromarty and Bob Caspe of the International Entrepreneurship Center (ICE). ICE is a place where domestic and international early-stage and emerging growth companies can find guidance, resources, relationships, experience and capital necessary to realize success. The Center’s unique approach to entrepreneurship involves drawing on a pool of experienced entrepreneurs to work closely with the resident companies to provide active mentoring, close oversight, and involvement in the development of strategy, marketing, business development, sales, and operations to turn problems in the market-place into an advantage. Additionally, through their international network, the Center helps their companies expand into other regions or countries by tapping into the expertise of their partners.

4:30 – 6:30 P.M. Youth CITIES mini-hack

Organized by CIC, Youth CITIES, and Belmont High School teacher Josh Goldfine, monthly “Mini-Hacks” will be a cross-collaborative approach to solving local community issues. These Mini-Hack sessions are open to all middle or high school teens, college students, entrepreneurs, educators, and other working professionals interested in having a non-competitive, highly respectful brainstorming session to examine and identify root problems of community issues. Through this cross-sector, cross-generation, cross-functional setting, we are hoping to inspire creative, innovative, out-of-the-box solutions to some stubborn problems.

Each month we will all tackle 1 topic, using a range of decision making and problem solving styles. After a collaborative discussion with peers, each participant will then individually voice an “elevator pitch” version of what is believed to be the best solution.

RSVP is suggested (for logistical reasons), but not required. To register, please follow this link.

5:00 – 7:00 P.M. InVenture Partners Office Hours

Come stop by office hours with Artem Zakharchenko from InVenture Partners. They are a venture fund with an emphasis on internet, mobile, software and e-commerce segments looking for promising teams with global ambitions and novel approach to solving real problems across technology industry.

5:30 – 7:30 P.M. Village Capital Info Table

Village Capital uses the power of peer support to build enterprises that change the world. In the past two years, Village Capital launched 13 programs worldwide, supporting over 250 entrepreneurs. Participants have raised $12 million, created over 500 jobs and served 7,500 customers.

Village Capital has teamed with VentureWell to identify top university innovators in IT and cleantech for their newest program based in Boston. Selected ventures will participate in our outcome-based accelerator, present to leading investors and be mentored by industry leaders and their peers. Village Capital pre-commits $100,000 of investment, $50,000 each for the top two enterprises, with a twist: the entrepreneurs themselves select who gets funded.

Village Capital is currently recruiting enterprises in clean tech and mobile IT that are looking to scale globally for out Boston program. Applications are open now until October 29th. The program begins November 29th and runs until the middle of February 2013. Click here to learn more about the program and to apply.

6:00 – 8:00 P.M. MIT Enterprise Forum – Community Circle

Whether you’re just starting out or have already pitched to investors, you probably know that successfully pitching to investors is challenging at best and frustrating at worst. If you haven’t started yet, you may be overwhelmed by the amount of information that’s available — and unsure of which advice is right for you and your company.

In the course of coaching over 500 entrepreneurs — who have gone on to raise well over $250M — entrepreneur coach Linda Plano of Plano & Simple. has developed a system for translating complex technologies and sophisticated value propositions into a clear and compelling pitch. The system is comprised of her “Perfect Pitch” philosophy and 10 simple (but not easy) questions that every investor pitch should answer. So join us for Linda’s “Perfect Pitch” presentation on Thursday and learn how to get your pitch — and your company — road show ready.

Click here to register for this event.

6:00 – 8:00 P.M. Startup Weekend Info Table

Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world in 2011.

This year, Boston presents “The Battle For The Charles“, a staged event where teams from Boston go head-to-head with their best new ideas and concepts, followed by a 54-hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation, culminating in a showdown on Sunday, November 11th, when one team will reign supreme!

We hope you stop by, grab a drink and connect!

See you in the Café,

Pardis