We are getting down to the wire for this Thursday’s New York Venture Challenge: Building Big to Last—and we are pumped here at Xconomy.
The core of the morning event will be three entrepreneur-investor stories featuring the founders of Warby Parker, Tumblr, and Everyday Health alongside one of their main venture capital backers (Joel Cutler of General Catalyst Partners, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, and Habib Kairouz from Rho Capital Partners, respectively). Each of these standout founder-investor pairs will share insights about how they are working together to build great companies right here in New York that last for the long haul. As JP wrote yesterday, Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures will be moderating the discussion between Tumblr founder David Karp and investor Sabet.
Among the specific questions he plans to ask:
Of David, “You are a talented product guy with vision. Do you entertain product-specific input from Bijan? Or do you look to him for more strategic, non-product specific input?”
Of Bijan, “How do you and David communicate? Is it largely driven by formal board interaction or is there a lot of inter-meeting informal communication? Do you have a specific cadence or is it more ad hoc?”
We’re also excited because we still have a few free tickets to give away courtesy of New York Angels, which bought 50 tickets just for those at startups. So if you are at a startup, and would like a ticket, put in your request to [email protected]. You have to hurry, as we have fewer than 10 free tickets remaining (of course if you miss them, you can always buy one at our Startup Special rate).
And that’s not all we have planned for Thursday’s event. Peppered in between the founder-investor stories will be short presentations and, yes, rants from other cool startups and figures in the innovation community: They include: NY Angels chairman Brian Cohen; Frederick Cook, co-founder and CEO of Moveline, Samantha Saturn from comiXology; and Nate Westheimer, president of NY Tech Meetup.
The event runs from 9:30am to noon on Thursday (with networking before and after). It all goes down at AppNexus headquarters at 28 West 23rd Street.
You can find out more about the event and get your tickets here, even if you aren’t a startup. It promises to be a great morning of insights, stories, and networking.