fnMentoring functions accelerate your startup and expand your high-tech network through mentoring sessions with founders and featured guest experts. Functions are free to members but require your RSVP. If you are not a member you can apply here. Next week’s featured topic & guest will be:
Joe Kraus, Partner at Google Ventures
Topic Desciption: Seed Funding
Name: Joe Kraus
Bio: Joe is currently a partner at Google Ventures, Google’s private market investment arm. His primary focus areas are: mobile internet, payment and financing services, gaming and local services.
Google acquired JotSpot (the previous company he co-founded and ran) in October of 2006 and he worked at Google as a Director of Product Management in the Apps group working on Google’s social initiatives including Google’s efforts on OpenSocial, FriendConnect and Blogger.
Before being at Google, he was the CEO and co-founder of JotSpot, a wiki ASP brought wiki technology to the mainstream and transformed wikis into a method of rapidly building lightweight business applications.
Before JotSpot, he co-founded Excite.com in 1993. After raising his first round of VC, he held roles in business development, international, marketing and product management. He left in April of 2000 when he was running the product side of excite.com and the broadband excite.
After Excite, he co-founded Digitalconsumer.org, a grassroots consumer and political organization with more than 49,000 members dedicated to protecting consumer’s fair-use rights to digital media and to safeguarding the ability of technology companies to innovate freely.
He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an angel investor in several internet companies including LinkedIn, OpenCandy, Aardvark (acquired by Google in 2/10) among others.
Company: Google Ventures is a radically different kind of venture fund. Their hands-on teams work with portfolio companies full-time on design, recruiting, marketing, and engineering. Startup Lab is a dedicated facility and educational program where companies can meet, learn, work, and share. They invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in entrepreneurs with a healthy disregard for the impossible. They are not a typical corporate VC. Their team is diverse and so is their appetite for investing — they work with companies in virtually any sector and at any stage of their journey.
fnMentoring is on Wednesday, March 20th 2013, beginning at 10:30 am. RSVP to participate in this event.
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