The French-American Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco
 cordially invite you to join us for a :

High Tech Conference
"Mélange à deux: What makes a VC/startup relationship click"

Tuesday, June 5th
at Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe LLP
1100 Marsh Road Menlo Park
6 pm to 8 pm

The French-American Chamber of Commerce has put together a very interesting panel:
2 successful and different VCs will be there with a company they each invested in. They will describe the way they were interacting with each other, what make their relationship successful and efficient...
Join us for this amazing conference ; this is a great occasion to network and share professional experiences.
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Speakers :

Bill Tai - Partner, Charles River Ventures

Bill joined CRV in 2002 to lead the firm's West Coast practice. He has over 15 years of experience working with startups as a venture capitalist. His portfolio of early stage projects has included 39 companies spanning a number of areas including web services communications systems, and enabling technologies. A majority (23) of the companies he has worked with have become publicly listed (16) or have been acquired (7). He was named by Forbes to their list of "Top 100 dealmakers in Technology" for 2005. Bill's current startup projects include: Avvenu, Cswitch, Maxthon, Nantero, Rosum, Silicon Clocks, Staccato Communications and WangYou Media. His public company boards include Microtune (Nasdaq: TUNE) and Transmeta (Nasdaq: TMTA). Additionally, he serves as an outside director of TRADEBEAM, a company he founded. His past projects include a number of companies in the web, wireless, and technology segments. For a full list of companies by segment and outcome, click here. Bill started his career in technology with LSI Logic. He later established the semiconductor practice at Alex Brown and Sons where he positioned public offerings for Adaptec, Atmel, Cirrus Logic, Dallas Semiconductor, Exar, and Zilog. He began his venture capital career in 1991. He holds a B.S.E.E, with Honors, in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois as well as an M.B.A. from Harvard Graduate School of Business. He serves as a director of Illinois Ventures and is a past Officer and Director of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists.
 

Richard French, CEO, Avvenu, Inc

Mr. French built his career at a series of companies. He is currently CEO at Avvenu, Inc. a venture backed company which provides a free service that lets consumers and business users securely access their home and office computers directly from their web-enabled mobile device or computer. Most recently he was Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Open Source Development Network at VA Software Corporation/OSDN, Inc. of Fremont, CA. At OSDN, now renamed to OSTG, he brought together 11 disparate Internet properties, including such notables as Slashdot, Sourceforge.net and Thinkgeek, into a cohesive whole with the result that it became the de facto network for open source news and downloads. Under his leadership, OSDN became one of the top ten Internet media sources for technology news, community collaboration and shopping with 220M page views by 15M unique visitors per month. In the process, Mr. French turned an annual $11M loss on $12M sales into a $2.5M profit on $24M sales in 3 years. Successfully architecting OSDN’s exponential growth also required innovative changes to sales and marketing. Mr. French increased advertising by national brands and forged relationships with high profile accounts and agencies through innovative pricing, branding and metrics-driven sales tools. He also enhanced the quality of the editorial content of the sites and revamped site designs and services. Mr. French also has served as Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Emerging Technology Group at NetManage, Inc. of Cupertino, CA, and President & CEO of Infoscape, Inc. of San Francisco.
Mr. French’s large company experience came from Vice President and General Manager positions at Oracle Corp. of Redwood Shores, CA and Groupe Bull of Paris. Among his positions at Oracle was the leadership of the 200 employee Enterprise Platform Division with revenues of $1.8M where he improved margins by 33% while slashing delivery times and increasing quality.

Eric Benhamou, Chairman and CEO, Benhamou Global Ventures

After nearly 30 years spent building or running high technology companies, I created BGV to assist other entrepreneurs build or run a new generation of high technology companies. I will put my own money at risk, not others. I will coach, but will not be a consultant. I will invest my time and experience at the service of the CEO and the company first, and its investors second. I will teach, but will learn as well. I will insist on upholding the highest standards of governance and the best management principles and techniques, but will take myself seriously only some of the time.

Beatrice Tarka - Co-Founder and CEO, Mobissimo

Béatrice brings more than four years of travel industry experience and six years of consumer products experience to Mobissimo. Prior to Mobissimo, she was the co-founder and CEO of Axall Media, an entertainment software developer and publisher of games, educational, travel and reference products. Béatrice engineered the acquisition of two companies, negotiated licensing deals with Hearst and MGM/UA, and inked distribution deals in 20 countries. She also co-founded France Portage, a press distribution database provider, acquired by France Telecom. Béatrice holds a BA in International Affairs from the American University of Paris and an MBA from Boston University.

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Moderator:

Om Malik - GigaOmniMedia

Om Malik is the founder of GigaOmniMedia, Inc. and executive editor for GigaOM.com. Before launching his own publishing venture, Om was a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine covering telecom and broadband stories. For more info on Om, see the Om Malik extended bio.

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Registrations closed

$25 for members
$35 for non members
$40 at the door

Cancellations must be made 5-days prior to the event date
Any cancellation within a 5-day period of the scheduled date will not be refunded
Name of guests will be kept at the door

French-American Chamber of Commerce

703 Market Street, Suite 450, San Francisco, CA 94103

Tel: 415 442 4717 / Fax 415 442 4621
www.faccsf.com
Contact: Carole Granade: carole@faccsf.com