Speaker Profiles
Keith Breslauer, '88 (Panelist)
Partner, Patron Capital
Mr. Breslauer founded Patron Capital in 1999 and is the Managing Director of Patron Capital Limited, investment adviser to the Patron Capital Partner Funds (representing approximately €1.7 billion in equity across Patron Funds I, II, III, Patron India and Patron USA). Patron represents the leading U.S. and European endowments, foundations and pension funds and in late 2007 won best Real Estate Manager of the Year by the Foundation Endowment Community. Focusing on investments in European companies and assets associated with property related activities.
Sherry Coutu (Panelist)
Angel Investor
As an entrepreneur, Sherry established and successfully exited two web-services businesses in the financial services industry. The first (acquired by Euromoney plc) has operations in more than 70 countries. The second was floated in 2000 on London and Nasdaq. The IPO was 33 times over-subscribed and the company was valued at more than $1 billion before being acquired (by AMP plc). Sherry is active in early stage investing and has more than 20 early stage investments in her portfolio.
Ashish Patel (Panelist)
Managing Director for Europe, Israel, and the Middle East, Intel Capital
Mr. Patel has invested in over 25 technology start-ups including Suse, NetCentrix, and Multimania. He is currently Intel’s non-executive director of Pipex Wireless and is Intel’s board observer on ip.access, ruNet, and AVG.
Giuseppe Zocco (Panelist)
Co-founder and Partner, Index Ventures
Mr. Zocco’s investment focus currently includes ecommerce, services, and advanced communication components and devices. Giuseppe serves as a Director of several companies including Adconion, Certess, Milestone Systems, Ozon.ru, Telegent Systems and VirtualLogix. He was involved with several of the prior investments, including Virata (now Conexant, NASDAQ:CNXT), Ciao (now Microsoft), Numerical Technologies (now Synopsis), and Digiquant (now Intec, LSE:ITL.L).
Riaz Agha (Panelist)
Founder, Greatswitch.com
GreatSwitch is a new price comparison site where the business model is the key differentiator among its competitors. This is Dr. Agha’s, 28, third business start-up. His first company he founded at university when he was studying to be a medical doctor. He founded the International Journal of Surgery (IJS), a medical journal which he self-published and distributed for three issues. Dr. Agha then signed a contract within 18 months of launch for the journal to be published by the FTSE 100 Corporation Reed Elsevier – the global leader by market share in scientific journals. The IJS now goes to over 4000 institutions in over 80 countries with more than 70,000 downloads of its papers. Turnover has increased by 50% this year with gross profits up 344%. His company still owns the journal, its trademarks and the copyrights on over 400 scholarly articles. His second company, is Rich Media House Ltd, an award winning digital media agency. In the last two years turnover has grown by 236%, the client list is over 50 strong and includes NATO, City Car Club and the ACBS.
Waverly Deutsch (Panelist)
Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, Chicago GSB
Waverly Deutsch was awarded the 2004 USASBE Innovative Teaching Pedagogy for the YourCo simulation game, which allows students to develop and run a mock business through all phases of operation. She created this game to parallel the Building a New Venture course and to add experiential learning to the process, leveraging techniques from statistics and the game Dungeons and Dragons. She also won the Innovative Method of Teaching Entrepreneurship Award from the U.S. Association for Small Business. Deutsch has also been a full-time coach for the annual New Venture Challenge business plan competition since 2002.
In addition to teaching, she is also a founder and trusted advisor of WaveWords Consulting, which offers strategic consulting for startups on business plans, funding strategy, technology architecture, marketing, and customer service. In her years as managing director of NetFuel Ventures, an internet incubator, Deutsch helped them raise seed capital and launch three technology companies before the firm merged with ARCH Development Partners. As executive vice president of marketing and strategy for internet exchange company fob.com, she helped increase their media visibility by 500 percent. She spent seven years with Forrester Research, helping to grow the company from a 20-person boutique market research firm to a publicly traded recognized brand with a market cap of over $600 million and offices worldwide.