Founder Factory 2009» – Founder Factory 2009

RevZilla Motorsports, LLC

Dan — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:01:49 +0000

RevZilla.com, is an eCommerce web site, selling apparel, parts & accessories serving the $38bn/yr powersports vertical, internationally. RevZilla leads with a customer experience geared toward delivering a “WOW” and inspiring loyalty at every interaction. Launched in November 2007, RevZilla.com has experienced explosive growth to date. RevZilla.com was founded, bootstrapped, developed and is currently run by three of Philadelphia’s own.

Kidzillions

Dan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:27:13 +0000

Kidzillions is an allowance and chore rewards platform that lets kids spend and save their money online. Kids can wishlist items from third party sites, choose items to actively save for and using the interactive planning tool, they can see how long it will take at what rate to save for their items.

PlaySay Inc.

Dan — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:45:06 +0000

www.PlaySay.com empowers busy people to extract value from any idle minute with the most practical language learning on the go.

* Launched 2008

* Fully sustainable

* Privately Funded by PayPal Executive

* 10+ million free products in use by 4,000+ users with over 3,000+ products sold

Doug Alexander – President, Internet Capital Group

Roman — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:02:36 +0000

An original member of ICG’s advisory board, Doug joined the company full-time in September 1997 as Managing Director. Doug has had many roles at ICG including CEO of WiseWire Technologies, which was successfully sold to Lycos; Chairman of Verticalnet through its IPO; CEO of ICG Europe; and CEO of Mobility Technologies. In addition to these roles, Doug’s primary focus at ICG has been to sponsor and oversee investments in several partner companies that have included Blackboard (Nasdaq: BBBB), Verticalnet (Nasdaq:VERT), eMerge Interactive (Nasdaq: EMRG), Arbinet-thexchange (Nasdaq: ARBX), WiseWire (acquired by Lycos), LinkShare (acquired by Rakuten), CreditTrade (sold to Creditex), StarCite, Mobility Technologies, and Investor Force. Doug currently serves on the boards of Channel Intelligence, Investor Force, ClickEquations, StarCite, ICG Commerce and WhiteFence.
Prior to joining ICG, Doug co-founded Reality Online in 1989. Reality Online was an early innovator in the development of award-winning financial planning tools and online services aimed at the individual investor. With the advent of the Internet, Doug transformed the company into a leading provider of Internet solutions to the retail brokerage industry, and then sold the company to Reuters in February 1994. Over the following 3 years, Doug became a key contributor to Reuters’ many Internet initiatives and a frequent speaker on the Internet and its impact on the financial services industry. Prior to co-founding Reality Online, Doug was a partner with Strategic Management Group, a corporate training firm and three-time Inc. 500 company.

Education: University of Pennsylvania, B.S., Electrical Engineering; Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, B.S., Economics

Board Seats
Channel Intelligence
ClickEquations
ICG Commerce
Investor Force
StarCite
WhiteFence

Geoff Cook – CEO, myYearbook

Tracey — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:55:25 +0000

In 2005, Geoff became the CEO of myYearbook, joining forces with myYearbook’s teenage founders — Catherine Cook, age 15, and David Cook, age 16 — Geoff’s sister and brother. Geoff was instrumental in raising $20+ million in angel financing, venture capital, and venture debt to build the young company into a leading social media destination with 10+ million uniques and 2 billion pageviews per month.

Geoff previously founded EssayEdge.com and ResumeEdge.com from a Harvard dorm, built them into category leaders over the course of 7 years and sold them to the Thomson Corporation in 2003.

Geoff has an A.B. in Economics from Harvard University and lives in Pennington, NJ with his wife Kerri and two-year-old daughter Madeline.

Gil Beyda – Managing Partner, Genacast Ventures

Roman — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:20:23 +0000

Gil Beyda is a seasoned entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Gil launched his first company Mind Games in 1982 to develop games for the original Apple II. Gil then started a software consulting firm with Fortune 100 clients in the U.S., Asia and Europe. In 1995, Gil helped pioneer Internet advertising by founding Real Media, the first online ad network and ad server company. After Real Media was acquired in 2001, Gil pioneered the next wave of online advertising as CTO of TACODA, the first behavioral targeting, ad network. Following AOL’s acquisition of TACODA in 2007, Gil founded Genacast Ventures in partnership with Comcast Interactive Capital to invest in seed-stage, technology-centric, Internet start-ups.Gil has a MBA and BS in Computer Science from California State University. He lives with his wife and four daughters in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Jeremy J. Siegel – The Wharton School

Roman — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:53:15 +0000

Jeremy Siegel is the Russell E. Palmer Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Columbia University in 1967, received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, and spent one year as a National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Professor Siegel taught for four years at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago before joining the Wharton faculty in 1976.

Professor Siegel has written and lectured extensively about the economy and financial markets, has appeared frequently on CNN, CNBC, NPR and others networks. He is a regular columnist for Kiplinger’s and Yahoo! Finance and has contributed articles to The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, The Financial Times and other national and international news media. Professor Siegel served for 15 years as head of economics training at JP Morgan and is currently the academic director of the U.S. Securities Industry Institute.

Professor Siegel is the author of numerous professional articles and three books. His best known, Stocks for the Long Run, which published its third edition in 2002, was named by the Washington Post as one of the ten-best investment books of all time. His current book, The Future for Investors: Why the Tried and the True Triumph over the Bold and New, was published by Crown Business in March 2005 and was named one of the best business books published in 2005 by Business Week, the Financial Times, and Barron’s magazine.

Professor Siegel has received many awards and citations for his research and excellence in teaching. In November 2003 he was presented the Distinguished Leadership Award by the Securities Industry Association and in May 2005 he was presented the prestigious Nicholas Molodovsky Award by the Chartered Financial Analysts Institute to “those individuals who have made outstanding contributions of such significance as to change the direction of the profession and to raise it to higher standards of accomplishment.”

Past awards include the Graham and Dodd Award for the best article published in The Financial Analysts Journal in 1993 and the Peter Bernstein and Frank Fabozzi Award for the best article published in The Journal of Portfolio Management in 2000.

In 1994 Professor Siegel received the highest teaching rating in a worldwide ranking of business school professors conducted by Business Week magazine and in 2001, Forbes named JeremySiegel.com as one of the “Best Business School Professor” websites.

Professor Siegel served 15 years as head of economics training at JP Morgan from 1984 through 1998 and is currently the academic director of the U.S. Securities Industry Institute. Professor Siegel currently serves as Senior Investment Strategy Advisor of WisdomTree Investments, Inc., consulting the firm on its proprietary stock indexes. He is also a member of the company’s board of directors.

- Bio Credit: http://www.whartonhongkong07.com/bio-m-siegel.html

David Brussin – CEO, Monetate

Roman — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:01:12 +0000

David Brussin is Founder & CEO of Monetate, Inc. Monetate powers Intelligent Personal Promotions(TM) for online retailers. David is a serial entrepreneur recognized as a leading information security and technology expert, and was honored by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the world’s 100 top young innovators.

In January 2004, David co-founded TurnTide, Inc. around the anti-spam router technology he had invented. As Chief Technology Officer, David also managed engineering and technical operations. TurnTide was acquired by Symantec (SYMC) six months later.

Previously, David co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer for ePrivacy Group, Inc., which created the Trusted Sender program and Trusted Email Open Standard to protect and grow the email marketing channel. David created products to help email marketers increase response and conversion by protecting their trusted relationship with consumers.

In 1996, David co-founded and served as Vice President of Technology for InfoSec Labs, an information security company dedicated to helping Fortune 1000 companies safely transition their businesses into the online world. Partnering with his clients, David balanced security with the emerging technical challenges of doing business online, and helped many established bricks-and-mortar businesses become multichannel. InfoSec Labs was acquired by Rainbow Technologies, now part of SafeNet (SFNT), in 1999.

David is co-author of Computer Security Handbook (4th Edition), and is a frequent speaker and writer on entrepreneurship and technology. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Invite Media, Inc., a stealth-mode start-up working to analyze and optimize online display advertising.

November 17th, 2010 World Cafe Live

admin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:35:06 +0000

Founder Factory is set to inspire Philadelphia entrepreneurs, their mentors and advisors and angel and venture capital investors through real life case studies, examples and success stories.

Besides these stories, these successful entrepreneurs will advise three startups in a Fishbowl setting in topics such as go-to market strategies, value proposition, risks, funding and other topics that each start up goes through. This will be a chance for companies at all stages to learn about what to consider as they build each of their businesses.