We founded the Venture Café two years ago with the goal of providing our innovation community a regular venue to meet, make new connections, and help each other realize our dreams. During this time, we have been fortunate to experience a tremendous amount of growth in attendance as well as support from many strong partner organizations.

Beginning this year, we have decided to launch the Contributor Model. The Venture Café will continue to be open to all members of the innovation community as our guests; however, going forward we ask regular attendees of the Venture Café to become “Contributors”. As a Contributor, you are expected to be champions of the Venture Café credo, as well as to be a productive connector, facilitator, and conversation-starter while in the café.

So, in a sense, the beer isn’t free. Instead, we’re asking you to “pay it forward“.

Here is how it will work:

- Visitors to the Café are invited to attend as guests up to three times. During these first three visits, guests can learn more about the Venture Café community and offerings.

- After three visits, individuals must become Contributors in order to attend the Café. The role of a Contributor is to support the mission of Venture Café by actively aiding others to pursue their innovative and entrepreneurial goals. An analysis of the attendance of the café has led us to conclude that we initially have space for only 120 Contributors. As a consequence, becoming a Contributor is selective, similar to applying to a university, and is by application (see Contributor Application). Applicants must also provide up to three references (these may be Venture Café Volunteers, Contributors, or well-known members of the innovation community).

- During the transition to this new model, past visitors to the café who have already visited more than three times will be provided one additional opportunity to visit as a guest before they must apply.

- In addition, visiting privileges at the Venture Café have been extended to members of certain innovation-focused partner organizations (Boston World Partnerships (connectors), C3, CIC, CommonAngels, Critical Mass, Dogpatch Labs, Greentown Labs, Mass Challenge (finalists and mentors), TechStars etc).

This new model is an ongoing experiment to improve Venture Café and over time, we will analyze the parameters we have set and tweak them as needed.

We hope that these changes will create a more focused, committed core of regular attendees while preserving plenty of space and opportunity for new participants in our innovation ecosystem to take advantage of the opportunities the café has to offer as a cross-roads and meeting place.

Thank you.

Respectfully,

Tim Rowe – Founder/Chairman of the Trustees
Chris Myles – Executive Director

Hi everyone! I hope that you are having a lovely holiday season. After taking a break for the holidays, the Café is open this week for mingling and making connections.

We’ve been hard at work reflecting on our past efforts and challenging ourselves to experiment with our model in ways that could bring Venture Cafe to the next level, so please stay tuned for updates!

Thursday, December 29, 3:00-8:00 PM: Venture Café in Session

Recently, the Venture Café  team added the number of times you have come to the Café to your name tag. This can be a great icebreaker and also a way to reach out to the new members of the community.  Next time you are in the Café I encourage you to reach out to someone you see has a “1″ on their name tag, ask “How can I help?” and share your Café experiences with them.

The Café will also be starting a new e-newsletter in the new year and adding more community content to the blog, allowing for more interactions in and out of the Café. We look forward to continuing to facilitate meaningful connections for all of us within the innovation community!

As a reminder, if you haven’t already, you can connect to the Venture Café  LinkedIn group for interactions outside the café . Further, we encourage you to visit the Venture Café homepage (login on the lower right) to review your history of visits to the café  and to connect your LinkedIn profile so your photo can appear on your virtual nametag. For folks interested in seeing what is coming up in the Café, don’t forget to take a look at our calendar on the right of the page.

We hope that you stop by the Café this week to help us celebrate the new year and connect!

See you in the Café,

Pardis

As a reminder, if you haven’t already, you can connect to the Venture Café LinkedIn group for interactions outside the cafe. Further, we encourage you to visit the Venture Cafe homepage (login on the lower right) to review your history of visits to the cafe and to connect your LinkedIn profile so your photo can appear on your virtual name tag in the Venture Café.

Lastly, we want you to know that suggestions and event requests always welcomed – we are here for you so please give us your feedback.

We hope you have a happy holiday season and we will see you on December 29th!

See you in the Café,

Pardis

It’s amazing to think that Venture Café has only two part-time staff, along with the assistance of a handful of bartenders and about 25 volunteers who help with Café logistics and special projects from time to time. For the last six months, the Café has been stewarded by Renee Lin in the Acting General Manager position. Renee took on the role as a temporary position, to help “hold down the fort” and assist with the search for a permanent GM. Well, Renee did far more than simply holding down the fort. She worked to make Venture Café an even better experience for our guests, to increase the number of events and speakers that we featured, and to initiate a number of special projects. You’ve probably seen Renee bustling around the Café each Thursday, making sure that everything is running smoothly.  Her energy and enthusiasm for Venture Café is a gift and we are lucky to have her in this role during a critical time. Thank you, Renee.

When it came to finding the next candidate to fill the role, we were looking for someone who deeply understood the culture of Venture Café, lived the spirit of our Credo and our mission, and who was truly passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship. A difficult task, that’s for sure. However, we are fortunate in that such a person was already a member of the community. I am pleased to announce that taking over at the helm of Venture Café is Chris Myles. Chris originally came into the Café when he returned to the Boston area after a six year trip sailing around the world. Chris was looking for a way to get back into the innovation and start-up community and immediately felt a fit at Venture Café. His attendance at the Café eventually turned into a volunteering role and, now appropriately, into leading the organization. Anyone that knows Chris, knows that his passion and ideas abound and we’re excited for how he will apply that energy to his new role. Congratulations, Chris.

Another piece of exciting news is that Venture Café is working towards officially establishing our organization as a non-profit entity.  As a result, Chris’ role will be “Executive Director” as is more common in the nonprofit sector. Along with these changes, we are also looking at what the role of Executive Director of Venture Café means. This may be a role that is a perfect fit for an individual at a certain point in their lives, as they have the time and enthusiasm to dedicate to it, but that they may at some point move on to other projects in their professional lives – and we support that. For that reason, we are considering making this a rotating role.

With Venture Café, we are continuously experimenting, evolving, and iterating, so we will keep you posted on what we learn and where we are headed. Thank you for participating in our experiment.  We are always looking for innovative, creative people and ideas to test so stop by and contribute to the future of Venture Cafe.

Sincerely,

Tim Rowe

First, I want to share with you how difficult a decision leaving the cafe was for me. I have been engaged in this project, like some of our volunteer team, since the first “deepthink” at Middlesex in July ’09, while still in graduate school at MIT. But it is not only time I have invested, but a part of myself. The Venture Cafe community – my volunteer team, our regulars and the fresh faces each week since February ’10, numbering nearly 2000 in all – have embraced my quirks along with my passion, energy and enthusiasm for the intentional community we have formed together.

I can’t tell you how proud I am to have been the impresario (thanks, Joost, for that word) for such an outstanding collection of individuals and organizations. The cafe project has helped me discover and hone my abilities in a way that has forever altered my path. The feeling of connecting people who should know each other, who have a great conversation or sometimes much more, is the greatest feeling in the world to me. That said, the opportunity to do more and to expand the reach of my efforts beyond the walls of CIC, especially when the weekly sessions are in good hands to continue on, is not one I can ignore.

I realize now that this project was just the beginning of my second “career” – one combining my engineering problem solving background, my ability to see the big picture while maintaining an attention to detail, and my innate love for interacting with and helping people. No, I don’t yet have the answer to “what’s next?” but I know I must stay true to this new path – connecting individuals and enabling communities for the greater good.

Thank you to all the Ven Caf team, the CIC team and clients, my friends and everyone who has been supportive, encouraging and embracing of this idea and of me personally. As Tim mentioned in the previous post, next Thursday, June 2, will be the last session I manage and I would love to see you all there so I can thank you in person for being part of this community.

A few learnings I’ll leave you with:

• Make every effort to remember names, but don’t be afraid to say you forgot.
• Smile.
• Everyone has something interesting to say, you just don’t know what yet, so engage, really engage, and care about what they are saying.
• Be helpful, just because.
• Enthusiasm is contagious. Share your passion and you just might inspire someone.
• Don’t network, make friends. (Thanks, Chris!)

All the best,

Carrie

Carrie was deeply involved in the planning stages of the cafe, and launched the Venture Café Alpha, as you know, a little over a year ago. A measure of her success is that the “bustling” Venture Cafe was recently highlighted in the Boston Globe’s recent editorial calling out the grass-roots success of Kendall Square.

The Cafe has been in “lean startup” mode, using resources sparingly. Carrie has been instrumental in making this possible, assembling a large and dedicated volunteer community around the cafe, including bartenders, technologists, community facilitators, and special projects people. This has been hugely valuable as we have gathered learnings about how to actually stimulate community and create new connections, as well as about less glamorous details. We are accomplishing what we set out to do, without the need to go out and ask people for money. We’re proud of this.

Thousands of people have attended café gatherings so far. We have built partnerships with half a hundred organizations in the community, including notably a strong partnership with the New England Venture Capital Association, which has led dozens of VCs and angels to hold office hours within the Venture Cafe, and which went on to open its CriticalMass entrepreneur hub down the hall.

Carrie has brought her personality and creativity to the cafe, every aspect of which shows the mark of her innovative thinking. She has been a catalyst for new human-scale, interactive programming like The Capital Network‘s UpStart Roundtable series, which connects a seasoned entrepreneur with those just setting out on the path, and is in her element as a ‘connector’ for newcomers and regulars alike.

In the immediate future, two individuals will step up to take the reins. One of our bartenders, Brian Wang, is stepping up to a new role as Venture Cafe Operations Manager, and Renee Lin is Acting Venture Cafe Community Manager. Both Renee and Brian have long been active volunteers of the highest caliber, and we’re thrilled to have them step into these roles.

In addition, we are opening a search for a new General Manager aka Curator of the Venture Cafe. We are seeking a dynamic, high-energy individual with a deep commitment to building real community in this age of digital distraction. This person should be a sophisticated digerati with terrific social skills and the organizational skills to envision how Venture Cafe will grow and help build our region’s innovation community into the hottest, best-connected, most enjoyable innovation community in the world.

Thanks to Carrie and also all of you for your support in this mission. Please let me know if you or someone you know is the right fit to be our next manager, and, meanwhile, drop by the Venture Café – in session every Thursday, 3-8PM at CIC on the 4th floor.

Thank you,

Tim Rowe

In order to choose beers, we need to know first what our options are.  Thus, we pursue many avenues of education so that we learn about local breweries and what they are producing.  For example, the Craft Beer Fest – coming up soon the weekend of June 3 – has in the past introduced us to new breweries and brews.  Additionally, Beer Advocate, the magazine and the website, produces helpful articles and lists identifying what’s good and what’s new.  The website includes member ratings on beers that may influence us as to whether to buy a keg and what size to buy.  The local breweries themselves also have websites that keep us updated on their seasonal beers and events going on locally.  Finally, some local bars boast wonderful beer menus and are a great place to sample beers.  These include but are not limited to Bukowski’s, Sunset Grill and Tap, Publick House, Lord Hobo, MeadHall and the Lower Depths.  It’s a tough job to romp around Boston sampling beer, but it’s all in the name of research for the public good.

Once we know what’s out there, we can make the selection for the week.  In selecting beers, we try to balance a few factors.  We consider which state the beer is from, which brewery makes it, its alcohol content, and whether it is light or dark.  Variety is key and the goal is to ensure there is a beer for everyone’s taste, and to support the local breweries. Before I make my requests for the week, I check with the Massachusetts Beverage Business catalogue to see whether the beer I want is available in a keg size that will fit in our bar, and whether the beer is distributed by a company that works with our retailer, Downtown Wine and Spirits in Somerville.

The next step is to talk to our friends at Downtown.  They have been quite patient with my beer whims and are kind enough to deliver our kegs every week.  Downtown also knows its beer – knows it well – and always has good recommendations when I am at a loss.  Ordering from them often requires negotiation, however, because sometimes the local brewery is not producing what we want, or is temporarily out of the keg size we want, or forgets to send the beer to Downtown.  So, Downtown has to do a lot of talking with the distributors and breweries, and I have to do a lot of talking with Downtown about what backup beers would work if the ones we want are unavailable.  In the end, I get to learn a lot about different beers and channels of distribution, and Downtown gets the experience of working with a very unique client.  Obviously, I get the good end of the deal!

Downtown then delivers the beer on Thursday before the cafe, and picks up the empty kegs from the previous week to be reused.  Each tap has a line-up of kegs planned for it, so we arrange the kegs in the bar so that they will be easy to move around to tap and untap.

Finally, the kegs are tapped, and the beer flows into your cup.

It’s as simple as that.

A craft brewery, according to the Brewers’ Association website, is small, independent, and traditional.

• Small means that the brewery produces 6 million barrels or fewer (the website uses the term less, but that is incorrect).  This 6 million figure is new and triples the previous 2 million cap that was set in 1976.  While new resources and technology make it reasonable to increase the cap, this change happens to coincide with the Boston Beer Company’s approach to the 2 million barrel mark.  Boston Beer Company is the largest craft beer producer in the US, with Sierra Nevada trailing at just under 800,000 barrels.
• Independent means that less than 25% of the brewery is owned or controlled by an alcoholic beverage industry member that is not itself a craft brewer.
• Traditional means that the brewer’s flagship beer is made from all malts, or has at least 50% of its volume in either all malt beers, or in beers which use unmalted grains (adjuncts) to enhance rather than lighten the flavour of the beverage.

Craft brewers have distinctive characteristics.  While they use traditional ingredients like malted grains, they have a reputation for being innovative and for interpreting historical styles with a new twist.  Craft brewers also tend to be involved in their local communities through donations, philanthropy and volunteering.  Many of these small breweries have a loyal following and maintain distinctive strategies to attract and maintain customers.

American Craft Beer week is next month, May 16 – 22, and the American Craft Beer Fest will be in Boston in early June.  These and other events have raised awareness of these unique breweries and hopefully will go a long way to keep these small businesses producing the beer we’ve grown to love.

In this pilot of four monthly sessions, The Capital Network UpStart Roundtables will allow a small group of entrepreneurs to interact directly with a seasoned entrepreneur. As this is a pilot, we are looking for your feedback! Email us at info@venturecafe.net.

And now from Dan:

These are exciting times for the Boston start-up community. New entrepreneurs, new investors and new companies are everywhere, and experienced entrepreneurs and investors are lining up to mentor them. Nowhere is this dynamic more clear than in Kendall Square, and the Venture Café at the Cambridge Innovation Center is quickly becoming the nexus of much of that activity.

I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about. I went to an event at the Venture Café one evening last week, and as I walked out of the elevator I immediately ran into one of my clients who is also a fellow BOD member at The Capital Network (TCN), a non-profit focused on addressing the “capital gap” for early-stage start-ups. As she and I caught up, a contract CFO who works with at least a dozen venture backed companies (including her company) approached us and joined in on our conversation. From there, I proceeded down the hallway and ran into ANOTHER client of mine, this time a semiconductor company. I chatted with that team for a few minutes and then FINALLY made it to the Venture Café event, which was attended by over 50 entrepreneurs, most of whom I had never met before. There were several VCs and angels in the crowd that evening as well.

Clearly, good things are happening at the Venture Café, which is quickly becoming the place to meet the next generation of entrepreneurs. With that in mind, I’m very excited to announce the launch of TCN UpStart Roundtables, which will feature CEOs with many years of experience to help mentor brand-new entrepreneurs. This initiative is a collaboration between TCN and the Venture Café, and we at Silicon Valley Bank are pleased to leverage our network to make sure that there are always experienced entrepreneurs and CEOs on hand to lead discussions about start-up war stories and the decision making process inside of a start-up as well as to provide insight on what keeps these entrepreneurs and CEOs up at night.

Our line-up for the first four sessions of the TCN UpStart Roundtable is as follows:

• Thursday March 31^st: Panos Panay – founder & CEO of Sonicbids
• Thursday April 28^th: Leslie Williams – serial life sciences entrepreneur and current CEO of ImmusanT.
• Thursday May 26^th: Doug Levin – founder of Black Duck Software and founder & CEO of Ayeah Games.
• Thursday June 23rd: Eric Giler – CEO of Witricity, former CEO of Brook Trout and Groove Mobile

These sessions will start around 3:00, and the format will be a 45-minute informal roundtable discussion moderated by the experienced entrepreneur, followed by 1:1 mentor sessions between the experienced entrepreneur and the start-up entrepreneurs. The beer taps open when the cafe opens at 3:00 on Thursdays and SVB will buy dinner for everyone from time to time, so there is sure to be ample opportunity to stick around afterwards to meet new friends and either give back or learn from someone else who is at the Venture Café to give back themselves until the cafe closes at 8pm.

TCN UpStart Roundtables

Fourth Thursday of the month, 3 – 6pm

One Broadway, 4^th Floor, Cambridge, MA

For more information please visit the Venture Café calendar, or follow the Venture Café on Twitter.

What’s the best business advice you’ve ever received?

Catch summaries of what people found most valuable below or watch the video for their full commentary.

Daniel Sullivan (Founder, Appswell): “Be careful what you’re good at. Don’t be the guy that comes in on Saturday unless you want that to be your thing.”

Peter Galdi (Customer Interaction Manager, alfabet): “Don’t have any fear. Do whatever you think will get you the best advantage to succeed.”

Conor White-Sullivan (CEO & founder, Localocracy): “Charge as soon as possible and learn how to close a sale. Find out if what you’re building is actually something of value.”

[Unidentified]: “George Allen became a great coach because he had worked for George Halas, Hall of Fame coach of the Chicago Bears. Find a star, work for that star, and be like them.”