How to Build your Enterprise Startup
First-time founders usually struggle to start their Enterprise startup, especially with sourcing pilots and developing a sales pipeline with Enterprise as a customer. As part of the CMU T&E Startup School event series, this panel discussion provides a future founder with a guide to successfully building your Enterprise startup.
Agenda:
5:00-6:00 pm PDT: Panel Discussion + Q&A
We will explore a few key themes on building your Enterprise startup and a few more along with questions from the Audience!
Experience starting an Enterprise startup the first time and the journey!
Enterprise Sales; From pilot to the first client and to building a sales pipeline
Early Stage Metrics: current traction vs potential for growth
Fundraising tips for Future Enterprise Founders
About the Panel Speakers:
Mehdi Samadi, (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mehdisamadi/) is the Co-Founder & CEO of Intellipse. Prior to co-founding Intellipse, he was the Co-Founder of Solvvy, where he had been both the CTO & CEO on different occasions. Mehdi holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Danielle D'Agostaro, (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ddagostaro1/) is the Principal Partner at WV Ventures, a $100M VC joint venture between Advocate Aurora Health, Foxconn, Johnson Controls, and Northwestern Mutual. Danielle is an experienced operator with a demonstrated history in early-stage startup investments. Prior to WVV, Danielle spent the last 7 years building the Alchemist Accelerator into the leading enterprise accelerator in the country where she was Managing Partner and COO. In that role, not only did she run the daily operations of the company, but she also invested in and worked with over 400 companies such as LaunchDarkly, Rigetti Quantum Computing, and Cobalt.io. Before that, she worked at Adobe Systems as a digital marketer. Danielle received a B.A. in Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Ehsan Totoni, (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ehsan-totoni-44928286/) is the Co-Founder & CTO of bodo.ai. Ehsan is an entrepreneur, computer science researcher, and software engineer working on the democratization of High-Performance Computing (HPC) for data analytics/AI/ML. Ehsan received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working on various aspects of HPC and Parallel Computing. He then worked as a research scientist at Intel Labs and Carnegie Mellon University, focusing on programming systems to address the gap between programmer productivity and computing performance.
The Panel Discussion will be moderated by:
Jennifer Li, (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferhli/) is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz focused on enterprise investments in data infrastructure and analytics, open-source, developer tools, and collaboration applications. During her tenure at a16z, she has been a Board Observer at Fivetran, DBT, Mux, Rasa, Instabase, Dialpad, Netlify, Preset, Orbit, Rewatch, and Stacker and co-led investments in Tandem, Rive, and Vantage at the seed stage (to name a few). Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, she led product at Solvvy, a startup bringing conversational AI to customer experience. Before that, she led user onboarding and freemium products at AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.7B). She was a Kleiner Perkins Product Fellow in 2016. Jennifer holds an MS in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.