Venture Café

We are seeking to hire an Events Manager for the Venture Cafe Foundation.  Interested parties should email hiring@venturecafe.net.

About the Venture Cafe

The Venture Café was created to provide a resource for the Boston entrepreneurial and innovation communities. Our mission is to enable fresh and useful conversations and to serve as a nexus for helping innovators and entrepreneurs find one another and collaborate to bring their dreams to reality.

Even in this digital world, it’s important to have a physical space. Shared physical spaces provide common meeting ground and a forum for semi-serendipitous encounters that often foster brainstorming and drive creativity. Meeting in person establishes the trust that’s so crucial to working together, particularly on risky, underfunded projects. The Venture Café also provides the framework upon which numerous experimental “applications” and events can be nurtured and launched.

Venture Cafe has been in existence for over two years and has supported over 11,000 visits. An average night has 250+ visitors throughout the evening, while maintaining a healthy balance between fresh new visitors (40%) and regulars who are contributors or affiliates (40%).

About the Events Manager position

Every week Venture Cafe Foundation hosts a venue with on the order of a half-dozen events at its Kendall Square Venture Cafe location.  This venue currently takes place on Thursdays, from 3-8PM, and requires some setup and cleanup before and after.  These events are large and small, ranging from regularly scheduled venture capital fund “office hours” (1:1 chances to meet with venture capitalists) on up to multi-part mini-conferences, such as the HackKendall event.

In addition, there are usually a half-dozen “information tables” where various organizations supporting the startup community attend and share information about their offerings.  These have recently included, for instance, the US Small Business Administration, MassChallenge, TechStars, etc.

Venture Cafe’s model is to host events and information tables proposed by, or run by, outside partner organizations.  As such, there is nearly always a counterpart for each event at the partner organization.  These events are nearly always open to the Venture Cafe community (e.g. they are not private events, but rather events that are widely publicized and open to a broad cross-section of the innovation community).

In addition, Venture Cafe Foundation is planning to expand to holding events in Boston in the Boston Innovation Center, which is under construction.  The types of events would be similar to those in VenCaf Cambridge, and the schedule would be similar, but on a different evening (most likely Tuesdays, 3-8PM).

In the future, there may be Venture Cafe-branded events held in other venues, such as the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (Microsoft NERD) also in Kendall Square.

Responsibilities of the Events Manager

* Work with event organizer counterparts to plan each event.  Handle all communications regarding the forthcoming event.  Communicate the philosophy of venture cafe events, explain the parameters for having events at Venture Cafe, describe the facilities and plan on the ideal use of them for each event.  Ensure the multiple events during a single day interlace logically with each other (often we stagger events to even out load on the check-in desk), etc.

* Be present at (nearly) all events, help with the setup and cleanup for the events, and generally ensure that they run smoothly.

* Develop and maintain a positive and collaborative working relationship with our contact people at our (approximately) 4 dozen partner organizations.

* Maintain the event-feedback system (iPad based scoring system on the quality of the event) to gain feedback about how specific events went.

* Brainstorm (with partners) additional types of events that make sense for Venture Cafe.

* Learn to screen potential new event partners for suitability to run events at Venture Cafe.

* Write announcements of events, and manage promotion of Events at Venture Cafe through Venture Cafe’s channels (blog, twitter channel, email, existing links with news publications that  publish community calendars, etc.)

Experience

Candidates should have at least one year of demonstrated events management experience.

Compensation

The Events Manager role is a full-time paid position with salary of $30K-$40K per year, plus benefits, depending on experience.

Thursday April 19th 6-7 pm
5th Floor – Havana Room

Join us for a panel that discusses the ins & outs of executing a successful Kickstarter campaign by four teams that have done it!

Moderator: Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe

Please register here

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