CoolTech Club panel : Building Your First Start-up: Panel Discussion with Founders/CEOs

WHEN

March 18,2010

WHAT

Open discussion on technology, entrepreneurship and startup management with Max Skibinsky (Hive7) and  PJ Gupta (Noca).

WHO

Max Skibinsky. Founder & CEO, Hive 7

Hive7 is a True Ventures funded social gaming startup. Home to a multidisciplinary team of web, gaming, and design rockstars, Hive7 has become one of the leading companies creating original and innovative social games on facebook & myspace games that are enjoyed by millions people worldwide.

Max Skibinsky is Hive7 founding CEO. After spending a decade in professional software & game development (Electronics Arts, THQ) Max started Hive7 in 2005 based on his vision of brining web 2.0 innovation to the world of gaming. Max graduated from Physics faculty of Moscow State University.

PJ Gupta , Founder & CEO, Noca

Noca has built an end-to-end payment system that could be a game changer in the online payments field with processing costs of less than 1% for online Merchants. For Consumers it has built a new user experience that allows the consumer to signup, make a payment inline without being redirected to another site using their their bank account. In addition everytime a consumer makes a payment the payment information is pre-filled making it a "one click pay" system. PJ Gupta is the founder of Noca and the former Chief Network Architect of VISA.

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