About us

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev meets
with Managing Partners from the top 20
Silicon Valley Venture Capital funds and

TEC Managing Director, Anna Dvornikova.

The Entrepreneurs' Club (formerly CoolTech Club) – www.tecglobal.org - is an international multi-ethnic network of several thousand high-tech entrepreneurs, executives and other professionals started in 2003. Our members speak Russian, English, Hebrew and many European languages. We are headquartered in Silicon Valley and hold regular meetings in Palo Alto, New York, Washington, Tel Aviv, Moscow, and San Francisco. Our team consists of successful entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists and technology experts.

We know what entrepreneurs need from the inside as we have built start-ups which failed and were successful. For over 5 years we led the American Business Association of Russian speaking professionals (AmBAR) and grew it from a small community gathering to the internationally renowned organization. In 2005 we founded the Silicon Valley Open Doors Technology Investment Conference (SVOD), a unique event that brought Silicon Valley venture capitalists together with the Russian-speaking entrepreneurs. In the spring of 2010, we brought the first ever delegation of Managing Partners from 20 top Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms to Moscow and co-hosted the Russian President Medvedev's visit to the Silicon Valley. We are committed to serve the community and bring value by organizing many interesting and valuable events and programs.

TEC Events (Silicon Valley)

Yuri Milner, CEO, DST with TEC Managing
Directors, Anna Dvornikova and

Stas Khirman in Moscow.

Generally TEC events take place ten times a year in Silicon Valley. The original goal for the club meet-ups is to promote community and collaboration spirit among entrepreneurs of different (mostly Russian-speaking) origin. Both young and mature entrepreneurs attend TEC sessions to establish new business contacts, evaluate their innovative ideas on their peers, discuss new market trends and get an expert advice. The industries vary based on the interests of the community, but generally they include IT, internet, cloud, telecom, biotech, and nanotechnologies.

We also discuss the issues of marketing, sales and launch of the product, as well as questions of raising funding both from angel investors and professional venture capitalists. One of our important topics is collaboration with "Elephants" – big corporations, such as Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, HP and others.

Educational section of TEC meetings targets best practices in doing business on saturated markets, investment practices during all stages of the venture life cycle from inception to acquisition and real-life case study reviews. This part is presented by seasoned industryprofessionals and successful entrepreneurs and is exceptionally valuable for startups to avoid major legal pitfalls and undesirable outcomes from investment community. We also have close collaboration with Stanford University professors both at the Business School and Schools of Engineering and Computer Science.

Social activities are tuned towards team building and address two key startup pains – finding new partners for the venture willing to contribute their time and, sometimes, funds to transform shiny idea into a tangible product and engage industry "celebs" into board activities to raise venture credibility.

   

Steve Jurvetson, Managing Partner, DFJ with
TEC Managing Directors,

Anna Dvornikova and Stas Khirman.

Among our speakers were: Steve Blank, Serial Entrepreneur; Founder, Epiphany, Lecturer, Stanford University, Graduate School of Engineering, Pitch Johnson, Founding Partner, Asset Management Company, Tim Draper, Founding Partner, DFJ, Mark Iwanowski, Partner, Trident Capital; Mike Cassidy, Serial Entrepreneur; Steve Jurvetson, Managing Partner, DFJ; Vivek Mehra, Partner, August Capital, Eric Buatois, Partner, Sofinnova Ventures, John China, Managing Director, Silicon Valley Bank; Sergey Beloussov, Founder&CEO, Parallels; Jim Smith, General Partner, MDV; Brian Jacobs, General Partner, Emergence Capital Partners; Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote; Alex Miroshnichenko, CTO, Virsto Software; Bill Tai, Partner, Charles River Ventures; Esther Dyson, Founder of EDventure; Ilya Strebulaev, Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business; Asa Dotzler, Director, Product Management, Mozilla Corp; Alex Rosen, Managing Director, IDG Ventures; Matt Marshall, Chief Editor, Venture Beat; Stan Chudnovsky, Serial Entrepreneur, Co-Founder, Ooga Labs; Vlad Shmunis, CEO, RingCentral; Serge Plotkin, Partner, Opus Capital; Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, Co-Founder, Decru (sold to Network Appliances), and many more.

TEC Seminars

Event with Anatoly Chubais, CEO,
Rusnano held at Stanford GSB.

TEC conducts one-to-two-week long or short one-to-two day seminars to help US and non-US technology companies and investors extend their business operations in USA and worldwide markets by establishing partnerships and connections, setting up local presence, and accelerating cross-border business development. The seminars are generally quite focused with case studies and personal attention of experts to attending companies.

TEC Seminars include sessions delivered by investors, serial entrepreneurs, and expert guest speakers. Moderated team discussions are used to help participants assimilate the rich information content. The program includes company visits, co-located events, and networking with entrepreneur and investment communities.

The seminars allow participants to use their own projects, situations, and problems as program case studies with the participation of Silicon Valley and other TEC Chapters' experts.  The participants also have an exclusive coaching session with venture capitalists and technology professionals.

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart