In case you haven’t heard, we held a rocking 65th birthday party on Wednesday…for the venture capital industry. Nearly 1,000 attendees piled into MIT’s Kresge Auditorium for “VC65,” which Xconomy organized in partnership with the National Venture Capital Association and the MIT Museum. (NVCA bused over more than 500 VCs who were in Boston for the group’s annual meeting.)
Polaris Venture Partners’ Bob Metcalfe (now a professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin) kicked off the afternoon with a keynote address. Henry McCance, chairman emeritus of Greylock Partners, then took the stage to talk about how he’s applied what he sees as some top VC principles—like “dare to be great”—to a new field: supporting breakthrough research on Alzheimer’s disease.
We also heard stories from entrepreneurs and the VCs who finance them, like Kiva Systems’ Mick Mountz and Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures, and MIT inventor Bob Langer and Terry McGuire of Polaris. Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital dished on how he got involved early on with Skype, and Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz talked about a new model for running a venture firm.
Ed Roberts of the MIT Sloan School of Management moderated the event’s first panel on new frontiers of venture. Participants included Venrock’s Bryan Roberts, Theresia Gouw Ranzetta of Accel Partners, Noubar Afeyan from Flagship Ventures, and Foundry Group’s Jason Mendelson. They talked about things like the invention of the startup concept, and what exactly super angels are all about.
We finished off the day strong with a panel looking at the role venture capital can play in emerging markets abroad. Harvard Business School’s Bill Sahlman moderated that one, which featured Advent International’s Peter Brooke, Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor Global, and Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. It was an energetic sendoff to the reception, which was held a bit further down Massachusetts Ave., at the MIT Museum (which is running its special “MIT 150” exhibit to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT’s charter).
Most of these speakers are captured in the photo gallery below. And our photographer Keith Spiro from Kendall Press also got plenty of great shots of the audience networking before the program, and at our reception afterwards at the MIT Museum, so be sure to take a look (click on the thumbnails to see the larger images).
