Tavern Community Presents: Manage Your Startup: From Chaos to Clarity
Manage Your Startup: From Chaos to Clarity
Join us for an inspiring and collaborative event with Tavern Community and Lawrence Krubner at Tempo by Hilton, Times Square!
See photos of our previous event. (Credit to Fabio García)
Event Highlights:
Communal Lunch: Meet and connect with fellow entrepreneurs over a relaxed, communal lunch while sharing insights and experiences. (Lunch is ordered à la carte, not included in your ticket)
Panel Discussion: Hear from seasoned startup experts, including Eric Topel, Andrew Ackerman, Michelle Akhenidor, Ben Mills, Jeff Peeler and Andrew McAuliffe who will share their journeys, challenges, and strategies for turning chaos into clarity while managing a startup.
Happy Hour: Wind down and solidify new connections in a casual happy hour setting. (First drink-house beer or wine-included in your ticket)
Join us for the whole day, or just come for the Panel Discussion at 1:30 PM.
Meet the Speakers:
Eric Topel is a strategic and innovative legal counsel and business partner with a demonstrated history of helping start-ups and well-established businesses across industries grow and thrive in a profitable, socially responsible, and sustainable way. In the coming weeks Eric will be joining a Series B, SaaS startup as its Head of Legal. Previously, Eric served as Global General Counsel for Patsnap, a Series E patent analytics and innovation intelligence platform overseeing all corporate and commercial legal matters in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, China, Japan and Singapore. Prior to joining Patsnap, Eric spent: (i) two years at Socure, a Series E digital identity validation and fraud prevention SaaS company, where he was responsible for all corporate legal and litigation matters, including pre-IPO due diligence, cap table and equity incentive plan management and administration, corporate compliance, employee relations, oversaw a $70 million acquisition and post-merger integration, and helped secure a $95 million debt facility; (ii) three-plus years with UiPath, where he helped build out the corporate legal infrastructure and grow the organization from a $3 billion-dollar private Series C company with 1,800 employees to a NYSE-listed company valued at $30+ billion with 4,000 employees in 40 countries; and (iii) over seven years with Danone North America, where he served in various leadership roles, including acting as General Counsel for its U.S. water business where he helped scale the business 3x in three years.
Michelle Akhidenor is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Lister and Founder & CEO of The Peers Project - an award-winning podcast agency with global operations born in Australia and headquartered in New York. In 2018, Michelle launched The Peers Project at 24 years old and in its first 6 years, bootstrapped and scaled the agency to work with Fortune 500s and the world’s biggest tech brands including Shopify, Indeed.com & Alibaba, all the while running the company with zero employees and instead, a team of permanent contractors. Since its inception, The Peers Project and its podcasts have garnered extensive recognition with features in Forbes, Marie Claire, Ad New and Radio Today to name a few. In 2021, The Peers Project became Australian Podcast Awards Finalists and Pause Award Winners. Prior to founding her company, Michelle started a global podcast, PEERS, where she continues to host conversations with some of the world’s most inspiring young founders. From an archive of 250+ episodes, past guests include fellow Forbes 30 Under 30 Listers and TEDx speakers from across the US, Australia, UK and Asia.
Andrew Ackerman is a serial entrepreneur turned early stage investor and innovation expert. He has invested in over 70 startups over the past 2 decades. Andrew is currently the Strategic Advisor & Head of REACH Labs for Second Century Ventures, consults on corporate innovation strategies (CVC, accelerators, venture studios, etc.), and is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship. He was previously Managing Director at Dreamit Ventures where he launched and built both their Edtech and Urbantech (Proptech and Construction) verticals. Andrew has written over 60 published articles for Fortune, Forbes, Propmodo, CREtech, Builders Online, Architect Magazine, Multifamily Executive, AlleyWatch, Edsurge, The 74 Million, et. al. and is the author of “The Entrepreneur’s Odyssey” (Routledge Press, Spring 2025) a textbook-disguised-as-a-novel on how to launch a successful startup.
Jeff Peeler is a technology leader with more than 15 years experience deep in the technical guts of large, complex systems. At RedHat, he worked on OLM, the Operator Lifecycle Manager, which is a system to manage operators on Kubernetes. Before that he worked on Kubernetes, Service Catalog, and multiple OpenStack projects. At Capital One, he changed his infrastructure development focus from software to operations and started his first SRE role. He was an SRE within retail division focused on making deployments more resilient through alerting, dashboards, and scalability. He also assisted in porting several applications to have their lifecycle maintained via Jenkins pipelines. He is now at Bumble, assisting with the development and deployment of some of their community-oriented software.
Andrew McAuliffe - With 20 years of expertise in sales, marketing, & operations for SAAS startups (EZFacility/NinjaCat - 1 exit, 1 series A and growing), Andrew has identified problems across multiple industries and solved them through technology & ingenuity. This has led to huge customer retention & revenue growth for businesses across many industries. In recent years, he has become an expert in the engagement & gifting space and is the CEO of ForeverCard which is an engagement platform to help with employee recognition and customer retention/growth. A great solution for any organization that wants to show gratitude to those that matter most.
Benjamin Mills, CPA is the owner of Cardigan Consulting LLC. A pioneering fractional CFO firm that assists business owners with achieving their goals. Prior to launching Cardigan Consulting, Ben was a Partner in a leading regional accounting firm for the past 17 years, working with entrepreneurs to large established businesses in a wide range of industries. Ben is also an adjunct professor at Marist University where he teaches accounting. He currently serves on the board and is the past board-chair of the Greater Hudson Valley Council BSA, which serves over 8,000 youth covering 7 counties in NY. He is the Past-President of the Mahwah Regional Chamber of Commerce, which served over 450 business members in Northern NJ.
Let’s turn chaos into clarity and create the future of startups together!
🕒 Start Time: 11:30 AM
Location: Tempo by Hilton, Times Square
RSVP Required
Schedule:
11:30 AM: Welcome, mingle, cowork
12:00 PM Communal lunch (Lunch is ordered à la carte, not included in your ticket)
1:30 PM: Panel talks, followed by audience conversation
3:00 PM: Coworking
4:30 PM: Happy hour
RSVP now to secure your spot!