Events

Funding, Exits and IPO's - Silicon Valley's Best Make Their Predictions for 2017 - #VCEvent2017

Registration for this event is now closed but tickets will be available on the door.

Please plan to join us for the 7th Annual Funding, Exits and IPO's event on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017 at the Quadrus Center in Menlo Park.

We think it is fair to say that most of us are happy to have left 2016 behind us. It was a down year for so many reasons. Oil prices tanked and the start of the year, Britain voted out of the EU in June, we lost David Bowie, Prince, Princess Leah and her Mum, Alan Rickman, George Michael and many others too. Amid the turmoil and uncertainty around the Presidential elections, it also appeared we might have lost the technology IPO market too. Fortunately we did see a resurgence in Q3 but nonetheless 2016 was the worst year for technology company IPOs since 2009, with only 20 technology companies going public.

Now that 2016 is firmly in our rear-view mirror, what should we be asking about the road ahead in 2017?

What will President Trump mean for Silicon Valley? Will his tax cuts and his promise to ease regulations fuel growth or will his anti-overseas manufacturing and immigration policies cause Silicon Valley to lose its edge?

Will tech start-ups continue to have access to greater amounts of private capital delaying the need to turn to the public markets or will the solid performance of the class of 2016 IPOs create the confidence for companies and investors to go public this year?

Who are the companies who will most likely IPO in 2017? Rumours of Snapchat, Palantir, AppNexus and other Unicorns abound but who will go out first and will they give the impetus to kick-start a frenzy of public offerings in 2017?

What will be the hot technologies of 2017? Was 2016 the year of Virtual Reality and is 2017 going to be the break-out year for Artificial Intelligence?

Once again we have gathered together some of the leading venture capitalists from Silicon Valley to seek their views on these topics and more together with their predictions for the year ahead. We will also see how accurate their 2016 forecasts were and will try to pin them down to some 2017 predictions too!

PANELISTS:

	BILL REICHERT Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures Bill Reichert has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur and operating executive. Since joining Garage in 1998, Bill has focused on early-stage information technology and materials science companies. He has been a board director or board observer at CaseStack, WhiteHat Security, ClearFuels Technology, Simply Hired, MiaSole, D.light Design, ThermoCeramix, and VisaNow, among others. Prior to Garage, Bill was a co-founder or senior executive in several venture-backed technology startups, including Trademark Software, The Learning Company, and Academic Systems. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey & Company, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., and the World Bank. Bill earned a B.A. at Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Stanford University. He was a founding board member and a Chairman of the Churchill Club, and a Board Member of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs. Currently he is the Chairman of the Small Fund Roundtable of the VC Taskforce and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
	STEVE GOLDBERG Operating Partner, Venrock Steve joined Venrock in 2009 after having been CEO of several early stage companies including DataRunway, Vidient, Arcwave and CoWave Networks. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Research and Development at Nokia Internet Communications and Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless Communications Division at Cylink Corporation. Steve also held senior management and engineering positions at Trimble Navigation and Hewlett Packard. At Venrock, Steve focuses on investments in connectivity, M2M/Internet of Things, robotics and embedded systems. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of Asoka, FutureDial, Red Seal, and Quantenna Communications. Previous board seats include Canesta (Acq by Microsoft), Kineto Wireless (Acq by Taqua), Newport Media (Acq by Atmel), and Teranetics (Acq by PLX Technology). Steve received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara..
	MITCHELL KERTZMAN Managing Director, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners Mitchell Kertzman is a Managing Director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. He has over 30 years of experience as a CEO of public and private software companies. Most recently, Mitchell was Chairman and CEO of Liberate Technologies, a provider of platform software for the delivery of digital services by cable television companies. Before joining Liberate, he was chairman of the board and CEO of Sybase, Inc. Mitchell was founder and CEO of Powersoft, which merged with Sybase in February 1995. A former programmer, Mitchell founded Powersoft in 1974 as Computer Solutions. He renamed the company and became a member of the Hummer Winblad family in 1991 when Hummer Winblad invested in the company, which became the leading provider of client-server development tools with its flagship product, PowerBuilder. The merger with Sybase in 1995 was, at the time, the most valuable in the history of the software industry. Mitchell served as President of the Massachusetts Software Council from 1994 to 1996 and was 1990 chairman of the American Electronics Association. He is founder and former chairman of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC), a think tank focused on issues related to the standard of living and quality of life of America's middle class. He served on the New York State Commission on Industrial Competitiveness and chaired its task force on industrial policy. Mitchell was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He currently sits on the Boards of Five9, Flite, HubPages, NuoDB, and Palamida.
	HANNAH KUCHLER, Technology Correspondant, The Financial Times Hannah Kuchler is a San Francisco Correspondent for the Financial Times, writing about technology with a particular focus on social media and cyber security. She enjoys telling the story of the Silicon Valley to the FT's broad international audience, giving them a daily dose of surprises from soaring valuations to Facebook's plans to design drones. Hannah has worked for the FT for over seven years in the US, Europe and Asia, covering everything from Chinese internet companies to British politics.
	MODERATOR RICHARD WATERS West Coast Editor, The Financial Times Richard Waters is the West Coast Editor for the Financial Times. His beat covers the technology industry. Before moving to the West Coast, Mr Waters was based in the FT's New York office for nine years. His roles there included Wall Street reporter, New York bureau chief, and the FT's first information industries editor, overseeing global coverage of technology, telecommunications and media. He previously worked at the FT in London where he held a number of positions, including editor of international capital markets, securities industry correspondent and accountancy and taxation correspondent. Before working for the FT, Mr Waters worked as a reporter and editor for several financial magazines. He also worked for two years at Lloyd's Bank International and lived in Chile, also working as a teacher. In 2004, he was awarded Corporate Finance Reporter of the Year for his coverage of Google's IPO. He was shortlisted for the Business & Finance Reporter of the Year award at the British Press Awards in 2003 and won the award in 1992 as part of a team covering the BCCI scandal. In 1988, he was named Accountancy Journalist of the Year. He appears regularly on the BBC, CNBC, MSNBC, CNNfn and NPR. Mr Waters received his Bachelor's degree from St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University.

Event Sponsors

Funding, Exits and IPO's - Silicon Va...

Date and Time

Wednesday Feb 22, 2017
5:30 PM - 8:30 PM PST

Wednesday, February 22, 2017
5:30 - 8.30pm

Location

Quadrus Conference Center
2400 Sand Hill Road
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Gold Sponsors:

In-Kind Sponsors:

2400 Sand Hill Road Menlo Park CA 94025

Fees/Admission

Online Registration:
$50 - BABC Members
$65 - Non-Members

On the door:
$70 - BABC Members
$85 - BABC Non-Members

There will be plenty of time for drinks and networking. Tickets include wine & gin cocktails (kindly sponsored by Dunkirk Spirit Gin)

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Contact Information

Beth Taggart (415) 296 8645
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