Venture capitalists are always interviewing entrepreneurs and CEOs—whether hearing pitches, sitting on boards, or looking for a chief executive to spark growth in a startup they have backed.
It isn’t too often that the tables are turned. But they will be for Xconomy’s upcoming evening chat, Consumers, the Cloud & Beyond, featuring three leading venture capitalists—Larry Bohn of General Catalyst Partners, Jeff Fagnan from Atlas Venture, and Rich Levandov from Avalon Ventures (you can read more details about them by following the link above)—talking about the hottest things in Internet venture investing.
This conversational evening event will take place in downtown Boston on September 26—and we are pleased to announce that moderating our interchange will be David Patrick, CEO of Apperian, the maker of a software platform for enterprise mobile apps that earlier this year took in nearly $10 million in a financing round led by North Bridge Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (from its iFund, focused on Apple iPad and iPhone software). Previous backers CommonAngels and LaunchCapital, both investors in Xconomy, also took part in the round.
David has more than 25 years of executive experience in the software industry, and is a serial CEO—having previously led xkoto (a cross platform enterprise database virtualization software company acquired by Teradata), and Ximian (a leading Linux and open source software company acquired by Novell). For good measure, he has experience at bigger companies, too. He became VP & General Manager at Novell after the Ximian acquisition. And he previously served as President of worldwide sales and operations for both The Learning Company and Mattel Interactive.
Along this fantastic executive journey, David has raised a lot of money from VCs, and interacted with them on other fronts as well. “After going through a significant process recently raising $10 million for Apperian, I appreciate the opportunity to reverse the tables for a few minutes and ask questions from the entrepreneurs’ perspective,” he says. “I am looking forward to the opportunity to discuss with three top VCs on how they see the climate changing for early stage companies that are looking for funding. What are the major changes we are seeing in how companies are ramping up using the cloud, SaaS, and other tools? How much progress with revenue and business model development do VCs want to see before funding a company? Also what trends to they see with early stage valuations both on the East and West Coast?”
Like Anderson Cooper, he seems ready to keep ’em honest—and have some fun in the process. The event takes place in a spectacular location in WilmerHale’s conference center on the 26th floor of 60 State Street in Boston, with a sweeping view of Boston Harbor. Besides the lively chat, there will be food and drinks and plenty of time for networking. Get your tickets here—the early bird rate is ending soon, and they are going fast.
