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General Assembly

Some of the events hosted/organized by General Assembly

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

foundersatfail.com HOME EVENTS EPISODES ASK A FOUNDER CONTACT US BLOG EVENTS THE EDUCATION OF A FOUNDER: COURSEHORSE’S KATIE KAPLER & NIHAL PARTHASARATHI After winning NYU’s Business Plan competition, CourseHorse’s co-founder Katie Kapler joked that “she had three jobs at the same time: a full-time entrepreneur, a part-time worker, and a full-time contestant.” Life as a founder is a schizophrenic tsunami of to-do’s and responsibilities. When you don’t have enough money, time or employees how do you evaluate: Which features to build? How to spend your tiny marketing budget? Whether to outsource or hire key roles? Learn how Katie and co-founder Nihal Parthasarathi made these hard choices en route to building CourseHorse into an education platform that hosts 20,000 classes monthly. WHEN: 7PM Monday September 16th WHERE: General Assembly 902 Broadway (4th Floor) '../DBpdfs/Initiatives/GeneralAssembly/WhatIsGA-1Pager_091012_v2.pdf' Event registration for The Education of A Founder: CourseHorse’s Katie Kapler & Nihal Parthasarathi powered by Eventbrite PAST EVENTS PETER SULLIVAN: TRIPL If you’ve read any tech press in the past year, you’ve heard about the Series A drought. Tripl serves as a humble reminder of the consequences. In just 2 years the company built a beautiful site, raised $700k, graduated from the DreamIt Accelerator with a surge of buzz, flirted with an acquisition by Facebook and slowly watched their bank account dwindle. With steady, but not meteoric growth the company lost heat as investors turned their attention elsewhere. Hear Tripl’s founder Peter Sullivan discuss the high’s, low’s and lessons learned through the process. SETH BANNON: AMICUS Over the years I have learned 3 things about our next speaker Amicus founder Seth Bannon: 1) Whenever I think I’ve put in a long day, Seth just caught his second wind and has 4 more hours of productivity in him. 2) There’s a reason he’s better at chess than me. 3) His lexicon of esoteric quotes rivals that of Wikipedia. Hear Seth break down lessons learned while building Amicus, a platform that makes it easy for non profits to turn their supporters into fundraisers and advocates. For a preview, check out Seth’s favorite hiring hacks. SEUNG BAK: DRAMAFEVER FOUNDER Starting a online television network with no content and absolutely no experience in television is enough to make even the most persistent founder begin to sweat. It may have taken Seung Bak 8 months to land his first licensing deal for DramaFever, but since then he’s built a platform that attracts more than 1.5 million users per month. DramaFever, the streaming service for subtitled Asian television, counts Youtube co-founder Steve Chen, AMC, and the family behind Televisa and Univision as its investors. Seung didn’t come from the hype of the startup scene, he and his co-founder saw an opportunity, bootstrapped their business, and went after a market. Hear how he and his team have gone from being a humble startup to the largest distributor of Korean television in the US and Canada. JON AXELROD Few industries have fought innovation as fiercely as the Music Business. Our next speaker Jon Axelrod has spent the past decade building startups in the space. He experienced the pre-bubble rocket ship as founder of Music123 in 1999 and the fallout post Napster. Undeterred, he went on to found MusicGremlin which was acquired by SanDisk in 2008. He currently serves as Managing Director of Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator in NYC. He’ll be discussing the high’s, low’s and lessons learned when dealing with the music business. HOW TO BUILD A COMMUNITY ONE CUSTOMER AT A TIME Panelists include: Mark Peter Davis (Founder, Kohort) Amanda Hesser (Founder, Food52) Kathryn Minshew (Founder, The Muse) Jen Rubio (Head of Social, Warby Parker) Startups love to talk CAC, CLV, and CTR. In the middle of all that transactional jargon it’s easy to forget that it takes more than a sale to build a relationship with your customers. How do you create a community of passionate, loyal evangelists? Building virality into your platform and creating triggers to catalyze engagement requires thoughtful strategy and technology. Here how these entrepreneurs approach the challenge. COREY CAPASSO (NOMI) Corey Capasso (Spinback) Most of us stopped eating Play-doh around age 6. But back in those glory days, who could resist red’s flavor? I kid, but Corey Capasso turned that bad habit into big business by inventing flavored plastics. If you play any contact sport, you’ve tasted his product in your mouthguard. Capasso went on to launch Exchange Hut, Spinback (sold to Buddy Media) and Nomi. Hear this serial entrepreneur discuss the high’s, low’s, and lessons learned through his career.