Startup2Startup

Kenny Van Zant pioneered the bottom-up sales models for selling software at SolarWinds and he now drives marketing and corporate strategy at Asana. We’re pleased that he’ll share some of the secrets and lessons that he’s learned along the way. Drinks start at 6, followed by Kenny’s talk, dinner and table discussions. We hope you’ll join us.

More about Kenny
Kenny Van Zant is a business guy at Asana. He was the SVP and Chief Product Strategist for SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI). He’s an angel investor and advisor to companies such as Assistly, Erply, Chart.io, Delphix, PagerDuty and PuppetLabs. Kenny was EVP of Marketing and GM of Communications for Motive (NASD: MOTV), and the co-founder of BroadJump. Kenny has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas.

Join us on January 15th as we we celebrate another successful year of Startup2Startup at our annual holiday party. We appreciate your support over the last 12 months and look forward to seeing you at the 2013 events coming shortly.

Hors d’oeuvres and drinks will be provided. Proceeds will be donated to a charity announced at the end of the event.
Parking: There are free lots behind the building, as well as plenty of street parking.

EDIT: Pictures from the event can be found here.

Starting up a new company is hard enough. But how do you get engineers, business execs and product managers to work together when they don’t even speak the same language?

For our next Startup2Startup, Jessica Alter, founder of FounderDating, will lead a panel with AOL’s Ryan Freitas, Twitter’s Othman Laraki and Google’s Seth Sternberg. Each has been a founder of a successful startup and each comes from a different perspective. They’ll talk about the biggest issues between product, business and engineering and the lessons they’ve learned building their startups.

BIOS
Before she started FounderDating, Jessica started Formative Labs and was in business development at Bebo, Hands-On Mobile and AOL.

Othman co-founded Mixer Labs before it was acquired by Twitter. He’s now VP of Growth and International. Previously he worked on Gears, Toolbar and infrastructure at Google.

Ryan co-founded About.me and now runs it after its acquisition by AOL. He was an experience design direct at Adaptive Path and is a product advisor to many startups.

Seth co-founded Meebo after business school. As CEO, he built service that reached 200M uniques before it was acquired by Google earlier this year.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at our upcoming Startup2Startup Summer Party on July 25th in Atherton. Drinks and appetizers will be provided. If you’d like to join us, please fill out the form here.

We first met Dave Kashen a few years ago after he sold the startup he co-founded. He had just started coaching fellow startup execs on scaling and building their businesses. But what was unique about Dave was his precise thinking about culture and values, two of the squishiest and most important concepts for any leader in a startup. Since then, he’s been advising some of the best startup teams in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, so we’ve asked him to come and talk about the importance of and–more importantly–how to build extraordinary cultures at startups.

The Values-Driven Startup: Building an extraordinary culture
Drawing insights from Google, Facebook, Netflix, Zappos, Eventbrite, Southwest Airlines, Trulia, JetBlue, Meebo, Joie De Vivre, and many others, startup coach Dave Kashen will share a methodology for building and scaling an amazing, high performance culture that will maximize your chances of success, and help you enjoy the journey.

As co-founder of Wellsphere, a fast-growing online health startup, Dave experienced firsthand the challenges of creating a great culture amidst the demands of building a company from the ground up. After Wellsphere was acquired, he took a step back to figure out what he really wanted to do with his life, and realized that his life’s purpose is to help people be fulfilled and increase the level of well-being in our society. Seeing business as a platform for increasing fulfillment and well-being, he made it his mission to inspire, empower and teach entrepreneurs to build companies that bring out the best in their people.

Through his firm Quantum Leading, Dave has spent the last few years working with startup CEOs and their teams to help them to intentionally and systematically build their cultures, and develop as authentic, inspired, values-driven leaders. He co-founded the Unleashed conference series, bringing together hundreds of startup CEOs with leaders who’ve created some of the world’s best cultures to learn about and discuss how to build workplaces people love. Dave also writes about building startup culture at awesomeculture.com.

It has been an amazing 2011 and we hope you’re excited for an even better 2012! Please join us on January 18, 2012 for our annual holiday party in January, as we celebrate another great year of Startup2Startup.

Interested in joining us? Fill out this form.

Earlier this year, we had a few friends from the tech giants of Silicon Valley share what it is like from their point of view to buy startups. But what is it like to sell a startup? How do you make that decision? What mistakes are made even before companies are started? How do you get over the negotiations hump? And what happens after you get acquired?

This month, we’re lucky to have a few friends help answer those questions. Jack Abraham, Leonard Speiser and Bryan Mason will lead a panel on the secrets of selling startups.

eBay bought Jack’s company, Milo.com, last year and Fast Company called him one of the 100 most creative people in business today. Leonard is the founder of clover.com and Startup2Startup. Yahoo snapped up his company, Bix, about a year after it was started. And Bryan Mason’s company, Typekit, was acquired by Adobe last month.

Typically the lessons that these guys have learned are spread quietly over coffee meetings and emails. We’re lucky to have them and look forward to the lively discussion to follow.

As always, space is limited so please sign up soon. Invitations aren’t transferable so please contact James, Josh or one of the organizers if you’d like us to invite someone to this event.

The landscape has shifted dramatically since our dinner on corporate development and M&A last year. With a series of newly minted public companies (and a few more companies to come), how should entrepreneurs think about things? We’re bringing together new friends and old from big players like Twitter and Facebook for a lively panel discussion about this new world.