Good times again last week, December 9, with Dina Routhier of MTDC and Graham Brooks of .406 Ventures in the cafe for NEVCA Office Hours, followed by an influx of cafe-goers just there for the connections!

We were also pleased to host the reception following the branding seminar organized by Harris Communications featuring Julianne Zimmerman, as well as the December meeting of the Django Boston MeetUp group!

As a reminder, we are working on the cafe calendar for January, February and March, and would love to hear about what events you’d like to see in the cafe… email us at info AT venturecafe DOT net.

-Carrie

What great fun we had last week at what hopefully becomes an annual event – a holiday party for those without an office party of their own! (If you missed it, you are in luck – we have another holiday-esque gathering with the Museum of Science Innovators on December 16.)

This Thursday had a ‘rolling start’, ramping up around 4pm with the arrival of Boston World Partnerships’ new Executive Director, Yoon Lee, and her fab cohort, Paola Mesadieu, for their monthly Connectors’ Corner. We had a few Connectors join us for the first time, like Amir Eldad, with whom I had the pleasure of speaking.

Later on, the #InnoPotluck, organized by Innovation Nights LLC (known better for the Bobbie Carlton-powered #MIN monthly product launch gatherings), was a fun, social night on a smaller scale than their usual gatherings – and developed just for Venture Cafe, with our Credo and ethos in mind.

We were pleased to be able to connect a willing food sponsor and new CIC client, McCarter & English LLP, with #InnoPotluck to be able to, in effect, bring the main dish for 70 people! (Delicious Blue Ribbon BBQ too!)

Check out Bobbie’s post, including a video of the MINNOw races (yes, actual fish racing)…

More photos coming soon! (And even from a new photographer, Sidi Gomes, better known for ParallelCities, his mobile app with a similar mission to Venture Cafe that he rolled out at the #InnoPotluck for everyone to try… everyone with an iPhone, at least

See you next week!

Carrie

Last week Thursday Venture Cafe was pleased to host NEVCA Office Hours, including Jamie Goldstein from North Bridge Venture Partners and Eugene Kuznetsov, a seasoned CTO and North Bridge portfolio advisor, as well as the MIT $100K Meet & Greet, although the event, or rather, collection of events, that filled the cafe were all focused on social entrepreneurship. In the evening, we hosted a full house for the DoGooder Launch Party along with the recurring Venture Cafe #IDTechUp (International Development and Technology Tweetup), which happens every third Thursday, along with a pizza party sponsored by Root Cause’s Social Innovation Forum. Check out the photos (including a great panorama shot from the previous week) from this week highlighting the roundtable VC Unplugged and a few shots from the evening events!

-Carrie

And now to the photos!

Scott Kirsner in the Cafe	Free Business Books, courtesy Scott
Adam Rein of Altaeros Energy, Mike Mullins of Startup Leadership Program	Schwag Swap Ladies
Not sure who brought it, but great idea… chess in the cafe!	Galen Moore of MassHighTech gets a beer

We hope you like the new homepage too. We are actively seeking excellent photographers to frequent the cafe so we can frequently switch out the slideshow pics, so contact us if you’d like to contribute photos. Carrie at venturecafe.net.

-Carrie

Children visiting the Cambridge Innovation Center, our gracious host, for their annual trick or treating were happy to find the Venture Cafe participating in the candy distribution, and their parents happy we were participating in the beer and wine distribution.

Lida was in the cafe chatting with other entrepreneurs about his iPhone application which enable flash applications and other such plug-ins to work in a Firefox-like browser. As was Mark, who was discussing his Synchronize.TV API which hopes to help double taskers watching TV while working on their laptops. Synchronize.TV is software that will allow the laptop to interact with TV and query for things like what a character is wearing on a TV sitcom, bringing product placement to the next level.  Enhancing product placement is just one facet of what Synchronize.TV hopes to accomplishment, its main purpose will be to filter through information on TV and only report that which is pertinent for the individual using the service. You can learn more about Synchronize.TV at: http://synchronize.tv/

In addition to all the exciting entrepreneurs and trick or treaters who just gathered for great conversation in the cafe, Django Boston also joined this week’s Venture Cafe for their monthly MeetUp, including networking from 6-7pm, followed by a meeting featuring two speakers from 7-8:30pm. For those of you unfamiliar, Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. We were pleased to host the MeetUp in the cafe and introduce a whole new group of techies to the idea of the cafe.

See you next week!

- Leigh

As always the main event was Thursday October 21, 2010 on the 4th floor of the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway, Cambridge.  This week, NEVCA office hours were held by Mark Watkins, CEO of Goby, a search engine focused on helping plan leisure time activities ranging from unique vacations to interesting weekend adventures, and Kent Bennett, Vice President of Bessemer Venture Partners Cambridge office. Mark and Kent held an hour long Q&A session NEVCA has dubbed “VC Unplugged” from 3:30-4:30 PM and then entertained individual questions from area entrepreneurs. (Learn more about Goby and about Mark Watkins.  Learn more about Bessemer Venture Partners and about Kent Bennett.) This was the first time NEVCA has brought in a seasoned entrepreneur, and the response was uniformly positive. Not surprisingly, the sentiment was that it was good to have commentary from someone who had been through it himself. We’ll try to include more CEOs or founders in these discussions in the future!

Following NEVCA’s office hours, the monthly Development & Technology Night (#IDTechUp) was hosted in the cafe with Joost Bonsen of MIT Development Ventures and  MaximizingProgress.org as it does each third Thursday from 5:00 to 8:00 PM.  Joost brought Jocelyn Scheirer <rise@MIT.EDU> with him, who is working on the MIT Museum 150th exhibit on entrepreneurs.

There was a fairly large crowd at the Cafe this week.  Spencer, an MIT Sloan alum, was chatting and working on further developing his collision avoidance concept for airport docking gates. Spencer has already seen lots of enthusiasm from the airlines and UPS, now he’s working at perfecting his technology so he can roll it out sometime soon. Best of luck Spencer! Look forward to an interview with Spencer on our Vimeo channel.

A father-son duo (Keith and Scott Spiro) were sporting name tags boasting problem solver and researcher as their professions and when prodded for further details, they revealed that they worked as a marketer for Kendall Press  and as a Business Accelerator, respectively. When asked what a business accelerator does Scott revealed that they were responsible from everything from PR to funding, citing an instance when they had worked at image management for a group of Maine bikers.

As always, Venture Cafe is what it is because of you. Please put us on your calendar and tell your friends about us!

While I don’t have any great pics, we were thrilled to have Social #Changeup 5 as part of the evening portion of the cafe this week. Jeanne and Lex and their group of socially-minded entrepreneurs and non-profit professionals were a great addition to the conversations in the cafe and we look forward to having them back soon!

MIT $100K Associate Director Jarrod Phipps enjoys a beer with Samuel Chow and Scot Frank.

This week we hosted two MIT entrepreneurially-related groups – the MIT Entrepreneurship Review and the MIT $100K – in an effort to inform you about some of the great things that are going on in the entrepreneurial scene. (Note that the $100K Elevator Pitch Contest – open to all students – is giving away $10,000 in prizes, but you need to register now!)

Our idea in hosting groups like this is that their representatives are there to talk about what they are doing for the community and answer any questions you might have. We’d love to host a rep or two from more groups, from other schools and from the community at-large. Email info@venturecafe.net to get your community-serving organization in our calendar or just drop by the cafe!

Sigma Partners' Paul Flanagan speaks with David Henchy during BREW/NEVCA Office Hours.

And last but not least, Paul Flanagan from Sigma Partners chatted with entrepreneurs during his BREW NEVCA office hours, which we are also hosting on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week! Check NEVCA for who’ll be there, and remember it’s first-come, first-served, so do arrive early to make sure you get your chance to speak with the VC.

Adam Rein, MIT Sloan/Harvard Kennedy School student and MassChallenge finalist with Altaeros Energy, has a meeting at the Venture Cafe.

While it was a little quieter, especially in the early hours, things livened up between 4 and 7pm, with approximately 40 people attending over the course of the day. I especially enjoyed talked with Phil Fremont-Smith, a recent Sloan Fellows grad, who is working on a stealth startup around impulsive saving, and Chris Myles and Rudi Seitz about a future café collaboration that would be a great addition to the local entrepreneurial community (more details on that later!).

Looking forward to this week, we have NEVCA returning with two TBA VCs to chat about your startup, and two events as part of FutureM, the weeklong marketing-focused series of events created by MITX and presented by Microsoft NERD Center: PJA Radio will host their live internet radio broadcast on Thursday, and Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center will host a social hour on Friday (yes, I said Friday!).

As NEVCA has been doing recently, there will be 30 minutes for chatting in the café from 3:00-3:30pm, followed by an hour of a question-and-answer session for entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs with the VCs, dubbed VC Unplugged. This Q&A session is mandatory for those who wish to schedule a one-on-one meeting. RSVPs for the Q&A are appreciated but not required. Following the Q&A, those selected for one-on-ones will be announced. We’d love to get your feedback on this process and how the event is running right now, as well as any suggestions for improvements. Sign up here!

Also Thursday, from 2:30-5pm, PJA radio, a production of Cambridge marketing firm PJA, will be hosting their weekly internet radio show in the cafe. The show will discuss the WeEconomy concept and wrap-up the FutureShake campaign. b.good’s co-owner Jon Olinto will be the guest, discussing b.good and PJA’s “flavorsourcing” experiment, the FutureShake, that embodies the spirit of the We Economy. Note the show itself is from 3-3:30pm, and we’ll try to keep the cafe conversation to a dull roar during that time. Registration is sold out, but Venture Cafe will be open to walk-ins. Show participants will be hanging out in the cafe after the show – come chat with them!

Lastly, as a special opening for our long-term partner, Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center, and as part of FutureM, we are pleased to play venue to a social hour on Friday, October 8 from 4-6pm in the new location on the 4th floor. Deepak Sindwani will be holding office hours by appointment from 3-5pm (sign up on their site) and then joining the socializing, while six or seven other BCV folks will also be in attendance. Refreshments of both the food and drink kinds will be on offer, so come out and show your Venture Cafe spirit!

As an advance announcement, we are excited to be hosting New Prosperity Initiative’s Social Changeup 5 next week, on Thursday, October 14. Sign up now!

I’d also like to thank Boston World Partnerships (notably staffers Yoon Lee and Paola Mesadieu) and their Connectors for coming by and having a presence in the cafe each month for Connectors’ Corner. Keep an eye out for when they will be in the cafe next!

Lastly, thanks to Prize4Life, a nonprofit prize competition seeking a cure for ALS/Lou Gehrig’s Disease, for hosting a CIC Block Party/Pizza Party for Venture Cafe, and for CIC clients. We really enjoyed working to put this together with them and hope they got lots of sign-ups for their 5k Run for Life in October (based in Kendall Square no less). If you are a non-profit in the Boston area who has a connection to entrepreneurship or innovation and would like to sponsor an event like this, send an email to info@venturecafe.net!

A quick shout-out to Anton Saraykin, Chris Myles, Lex from Barismo, Matt Hodgson, Muthu Arumugam, Ben Hron, and Tim Rowe, for ‘entering the cafe’ via the virtual nametag system, and for connecting their LinkedIn profiles. The more LinkedIn profile connections, the better! Help us out and connect yours today.

This coming week we are a little light on events with the International Development and Technology night in the house, but we are always open on Thursdays from 3-8pm for casual conversation and beer! If you are or know someone who is interested in ID, do send them over between 5 and 7pm.

The following week, September 23, Venture Cafe alpha will be moving to the 4th floor and we will have lots going on, so please be sure to come check out the new space.

As a brief aside, I know many of you met our wonderful summer operations intern, Liz Peyton, who is now back at BU starting her senior year. If you know of anyone who would be interested in joining the Venture Cafe team as our Fall/Winter Operations Intern, which involves setting up and cleaning up the cafe on Thursdays, being present and social throughout, writing blog posts and scheduling tweets, please send me an email at carrie@venturecafe.net.

Best,

Carrie

Part of the intimate crowd this week included appearances by Galen Moore (Mass High Tech staff writer) and Greg Huang (Xconomy Boston editor), who scheduled a meeting at the Cafe with each other (!), Bobbie Carlton (Mass Innovation Nights organizer), and Joost Bonsen (MIT ‘minion’).

A piece of our mission is to be a window into Kendall Square’s buildings, to benefit the Kendall community as well as the Greater Boston community. This week we hosted the MIT VentureShips Club to talk about the opportunities for startups to work with teams of MIT grads and undergrads during the term. (“VentureShips” is a mash-up of venture and internship – i.e., internships at startups.) Taroon Aggarwal, Vice President of External Relations, as well as two of his colleagues chatted with attendees about their startups and about the program from 4-6pm.

As I’ve done in the past – an incentive to connect your LinkedIn profile to your nametag is getting listed here. Here are the stars for this week, in order of check in: Matt Hodgson, Ben Hron, Michael Cohen, Chris Myles, and Amy Tindell. I’d love to be able to mention you in a future week! All you have to do is connect your LinkedIn profile, visit the cafe on a Thursday when we’re open, and sign in to the virtual nametag system. Email info@venturecafe.net if you have any trouble connecting your profile.

Thanks again to all of our visitors, this week and every week, and to our 801 (!) Twitter followers! You are what makes Venture Cafe the place to be on Thursdays… well, that and our great beer

- Carrie