NYU

Venture Studio (27): Sachin Kamdar, CEO Parse.ly

Parsely

I met with Sachin Kamdar recently, CEO of Parse.ly. In essence the company allows online publishers to optimize their existing content through personalization. Users get to visit their favorite news sites, but with Parse.ly those sites now understand the tastes of their readers and can deliver more relevant content to them. Their products have already driven millions of clickthroughs for their customers and their newest product, Dash, now tracks over 500 million pageviews a month and is growing rapidly. 

Sachin and his co-founder Andrew Montalenti have a great story- and they way they've stuck together through thick and thin, their inventiveness, willingness to adapt to the needs of the market is simply awesome.

My favorite line was: "... get product market fit, gain the domain expertise, be persistent and eventually you get there..."

Enjoy

00:10 What is Parse.ly?

00:23 Their new analytics system: Parse.ly Dash (capturing >300 million page views per month)

00:56 The origins of the company, how the cofounders literally worked nightly to figure out what they should do (while holding down day jobs), and eventually got into DreamIT Ventures accelerator

2:23:  Their funding story (Blumberg Capital, ff Ventures, Scott Becker and other angels)

3:25:  The challenges they encountered prior to receiving funding, ie. doing consulting on the side to help bootstrap the company, etc! What qualities Sachin thinks it takes to succeed

 

Screen shot 2011-11-16 at 8.47.45 AM (2)

Venture Studio (6): Trevor Owens: Entrepreneur, Super-Connector, Community Organizer

This is Episode (6) of Venture Studio

Welcome to this conversation with one of the most dynamic members of New York's tech community, the omnipresent and ubiquitous Trevor Owens who embodied the concept of "student entrepreneur" during his time at NYU. He has recently left school to launch two startups simultaneously. Enjoy.

Below is a short table of contents (with corresponding minutes) of our conversation.

:15          How a finance major @NYU got drawn into tech world? 

3:31       "I was taking every awesome opportunity I could & running with it"

3:39       Heard that Trevor Owens is leaving NYU... why, how, etc.? 

5:12        How his mentors, family, friends reacted to his decision

6:08       Trevor's thoughts on mentorship

7:38       Our discussion on team-building      

8:52       The story and business model of www.insidestartups.org

11:18      The story and business model of the Lean Startup Machine

12:47     Discussion of this Mobile Accelerator Model and his influences       

14:00    Trevor hiring interns. Has lots of projects going on right now    

 

Click Here: For Episode 7 of Venture Studio w/Jordy Leiser


         Square1Bank-rectangle-ese-shadow        Small_logo_startup-gp_color 

VENTURE STUDIO 2                 Nyvc_200x100-1

Discussing University Entrepreneurship in NYC with MIT's Entrepreneurship Review

Wall Street Bull

I was recently interviewed by MIT Entrepreneurship Review, MITER, a very cool new online journal covering the topic of innovation in and around the university space. One of MITER's founders, Erdin Beshimov, a Sloan MBA student formerly with Polaris-backed startup Experience and I had a good conversation about university entrepreneurship generally, but with a focus on all the good things happening in NYC.

I told him that whereas we still have a lot of work to do-  we are making great strides with university entrepreneurship in NYC of late.

For the full interview, click here.