 Mark your calendar! StrictlyVC's first INSIDER event of 2018 takes place Tuesday evening, February 27, at the elegant second floor offices of New Enterprise Associates at 2 South Park Street in San Francisco. If you want to mingle with some of the smartest operators in the tech-investing ecosystem and catch up with friends, you won't want to miss it.
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FEATURED GUESTS:
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1.) Marten Mickos is a former HP exec and the CEO of HackerOne, a fast-growing, five-year-old, San Francisco-based company that has increasingly become a mediator between companies with cybersecurity issues and hackers who are looking to solve problems rather than cause them. Those problems are getting bigger and faster, too, as Mickos will discuss with top security reporter Kate Conger of Gizmodo.Â
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2.)Â Ryan Williams says that Cadre, the New York-based startup that he founded with Josh and Jared Kushner in late 2014 and which connects institutional investors with commercial real estate deals, has much bigger ambitions. He'll talk with StrictlyVC founder Connie Loizos about what's coming and why he thinks he can pull off this transition, despite a growing number of competitors.
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3.) Tina Sharkey wants to build the Procter & Gamble for millennials by selling a wide variety of Brandless goods for just $3. Will enough people buy what she's selling, and how does Brandless compete with Amazon? Sharkey, in conversation with venture capitalist Medha Agarwal of Redpoint Ventures, will share her experiences to date and how Brandless evolves from here.
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4.) Caterina Fake wasn't interested in becoming a VC a decade ago, despite overtures from top firms. Things have changed for the serial entrepreneur and longtime angel investor. She'll talk with StrictlyVC's Connie Loizos about why she and fellow founder Jyri Engeström think they can make an impact with their new venture firm, Yes VC.
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5.) Robinhood, the commission-free stock trading app, has for years been trying to undercut its much larger rivals, like E*Trade. Last month, the company added commission-free cryptocurrency trading and tracking, putting it in direct competition with Coinbase, too. Is the firm biting off more than it can chew? We'll talk with cofounder and CEO Vlad Tenev about the future of his fast-growing company.
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AGENDA:Â
5:00 PM - 5:45 PM
Check-In/Networking/Drinks/Hors d'ouevres
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5:50 PM - 6:00 PMÂ
Opening comments with help from our host, NEA's Jon Sakoda
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6:00 PM - 6:20 PM
Marten Mickos (HackerOne)
6:20 PM - 6:40 PM
Ryan Williams (Cadre)
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6:40 PM - 7:00 PM
Tina Sharkey (Brandless)
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7:00 - 7:20 PM
Caterina Fake (Yes VC)
7:20 - 7:40
Vlad Tenev (Robinhood)
7:40 PM - 8:30 PM
Networking/Noshing/More Drinks!Â
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 MUCH THANKS TO OUR GENEROUS SPONSORS:
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Helping entrepreneurs scale rapidly and reach their peaksÂ
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Making private market transactions safe, accurate, and fast,
from first handshake to final close
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TICKETS:
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The StrictlyVC INSIDER Series fee is $105 per person and includes access to the featured interviews, along with the following social gathering. Hope you can make it for a night of top-notch content, great networking, and delicious food!
*Note this event is now sold out.  Join our waitlist here.Â
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Fake famously co-founded the photo-sharing site Flickr, which sold to Yahoo, before co-founding Hunch, which sold to eBay. She is also the founder of Findery, and was until recently an active angel investor whose past bets include Etsy (IPO), Cloudera (IPO), Maya's Mom (acquired by BabyCenter), and Typekit (acquired by Adobe).
Mickos has a long history of building global businesses. Before joining HackerOne, he served as an SVP with HP's cloud business after it acquired Eucalyptus, where he was CEO. Mickos also spent seven years as the CEO of MySQL, and he's been an entrepreneur-in-residence at both Benchmark and Index Ventures.
Sharkey knows brands. One of her first jobs was as a VP at QVC. It was then on to cofounding iVillage (later acquired by NBCUniversal), helping develop the online community for new moms, BabyCenter, and spending several years as a VC with Sherpa Capital. She’s still on the boards of Brit + Co. and Ipsy.
Agarwal is focused on early-stage consumer deals at Redpoint (where, notably, she is the firm's first and most senior female investor). Previously, she was a student investor with Rough Draft Ventures. She also co-founded Roomidex, a social roommate finding website. Agarwal, who has two degrees from Harvard, led Redpoint's investment in Brandless.
Tenev, a first-generation immigrant from Bulgaria, earned his B.S. in Math and Physics at Stanford before starting a finance company with college pal Baiju Bhatt that sold trading software to hedge funds. Some insights and several major tweaks later, the duo had created Robinhood, which is focused on free trading (including of cryptocurrencies) for everyone.
Conger is a top cybersecurity reporter for Gizmodo. She joined the outfit in 2017 after covering policy and security for TechCrunch. Previously, Conger was managing editor of the journalism startup Ratter. Her work has also appeared in Motherboard, The Daily Dot, San Francisco Magazine, and SF Weekly.
Loizos is the founder of StrictlyVC, the news organization and event series. She got her start in Silicon Valley at the original Red Herring magazine in the late '90s and later worked for Time Inc., Dow Jones, and Reuters, among other media companies. She is also the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch.
Sakoda joined NEA in 2006, and he's been investing in enterprise software companies since. He knows them particularly well, having previously cofounded the instant messaging and P2P security and compliance company IMLogic, which sold to Symantec. Earlier in his career, Sakoda was an analyst with Goldman Sachs.Â