
Craig Sherman
Partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Craig Sherman is a partner in the Seattle office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he focuses on corporate and securities laws, representing companies, venture capital firms, and investment banks in private placements and public offerings. He also has extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, technology licensing, and domestic and international joint ventures. Craig earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1989. He received M.A. and B.A. degrees from Stanford University in 1985.
Sessions by this speaker
May 16, 2020
09:00 AM
Fundraising Fundamentals
online
Understand the how and when of raising funds for your startup. Learn about the funding stages, mechanisms (equity, convertible notes, etc.) and the various options available funding for each stage. Understand valuation and the various clauses in term sheets and funding documents and what they mean. Understand how fundraising has changed in these challenging times and how to raise money in these circumstances.

Kellan Carter, Fuse Venture
General Partner(July 2020 - Till Now)
Kellan Carter is a founding partner of Fuse where he focuses on early-stage investments in intelligent software in both horizontal and vertical categories. At Fuse, Kellan has led investments in Owl and Pave. Previously, Kellan spent seven years at Ignition Partners, a leading early-stage venture capital firm. He joined Ignition in 2013 and was made partner by 2018. At Ignition, Kellan led investments in Botkeeper, Symend, Icertis, KenSci, and Azuqua, and served on the boards of both Botkeeper and Symend.
Prior to Ignition, Kellan spent two years in investment banking at Mooreland Partners in San Francisco. There, he helped execute M&A transactions for technology companies in a variety of sectors, including mobile, enterprise software, systems, and infrastructure. Prior to Mooreland Partners, Kellan was an associate in KPMG’s advisory practice in Orange County, CA, where he helped structure asset-backed securities collateralized by student loans, auto loans, and residential and commercial mortgages.
Kellan holds a BS degree in business administration from the University of Montana in Missoula, where he graduated summa cum laude. After college, Kellan founded an online, business-networking platform to connect current students and faculty to UM alumni.
Ben is the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and early-stage venture capital firm in Seattle. He is a technology investor and entrepreneur. He has a background in product management from Microsoft where he shipped the first version of Office for iPad and ran The Garage, the company’s grassroots innovation program. Ben also co-founded Madrona Venture Labs.
Sessions by this speaker
May 16, 2020
09:00 AM
Fundraising Fundamentals
online
Understand the how and when of raising funds for your startup. Learn about the funding stages, mechanisms (equity, convertible notes, etc.) and the various options available funding for each stage. Understand valuation and the various clauses in term sheets and funding documents and what they mean. Understand how fundraising has changed in these challenging times and how to raise money in these circumstances.

Sudip Chakrabarti
Partner, Madrona Venture Group
Sudip joined Madrona in 2018. Sudip is particularly interested in companies that are transforming the enterprise, cloud and infrastructure markets. He especially enjoys working with technical founders – sharing his own experiences as a technical founder and helping them to build successful teams and businesses.
Past Lives
Prior to joining Madrona, Sudip was a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners where he led or co-led investments in Streamlio, Serverless, Rainnet, Exabeam and, a Madrona portfolio company, Heptio. He started his investing career at Osage University Partners and subsequently was an enterprise investor at Andreessen Horowitz where he was involved with companies such as Actifio, Databricks, Digital Ocean, Forward Networks, Mesosphere and Samsara.
Before venturing into early-stage investing, Sudip was an entrepreneur and an engineer. He started his first company when he was at Georgia Tech, and his second while in business school. In between, he spent a few years as an engineer building complex software systems at Synopsys.
This experience of founding enterprise technology-oriented businesses led Sudip to the venture side and he has been investing in enterprise and open source software companies since that time. His founder experience gives him direct insight into the challenges of startups which involve ups and downs and persistence. He strives to be a trusted partner to every entrepreneur he works with.
Education
Sudip received his PhD in Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech, an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a B. Tech from IIT Kharagpur.
Sessions by this speaker
May 23, 2020
09:00 AM
How to Build A Compelling Investor Pitch
online
Learn how to build a pitch that resonates with investors. What do investors care about at various stages of your startup journey? What are the mistakes to avoid that can sink your pitch. How do you engage and build credibility with investors over the long term? How do you convince investors who have pulled back on funding due to the CoronaVirus crisis?

Dharmesh Singh, Fullcast.Io
CEO and Co-Founder(Jan 2017 - Till Now)
Dharmesh is leading Fullcast.io, a service dedicated to transforming sales operations to growth operations by automating planning, process, and operations of running sales. Prior to fullcast,io Dharmesh spent time at Salesforce and Microsoft leading teams across sales, engineering, and Operations.
Sessions by this speaker
Jun 13, 2020
09:00 AM
Building a Sales Organization
online
Learn what it takes to develop a strong sales strategy and organization. Understand how to tier your business to sell to different classes of customers. Align your sales strategy to efficiently to sell to small, medium and large customers. Understand what it takes to generate leads that your sales force can pursue. Be smart about what kinds of salespeople you need to hire at the early stages of your company and how to set up a proper commission structure to motivate them.

Shirish Nadkarni Author ‘Startup To Exit’
Serial Entrepreneur, TiE Seattle Board Member (July 2007 - Till Now)
Shirish Nadkarni is a serial entrepreneur with proven success in creating multiple consumer businesses that have scaled to tens of millions of users worldwide. Shirish was the co-founder of Livemocha, the world’s largest language learning site with 15+ million registered members from over 200 countries. Livemocha was acquired by RosettaStone in 2013. Prior to Livemocha, Shirish was the founder of TeamOn Systems, a mobile wireless e-mail pioneer that was acquired by Research in Motion in 2002. The TeamOn technology served as the core foundation for Blackberry Internet E-mail which serviced over 50 million BlackBerry users at its peak. Shirish is the author of an award winning book - “From Startup to Exit - An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Scaling Your Tech Business”.
“From Startup to Exit” shares the knowledge that pioneering, serial entrepreneur Shirish Nadkarni has gained from over two decades of success, detailing the practical aspects of startup formation from founding, funding, management, and finding an exit.
Sessions by this speaker
May 30, 2020
09:00 AM
How to Achieve Product Market Fit
online
Understand what it takes to navigate your product strategy to get to product-market fit. What is the methodology that you need to pursue product-market fit? What are the metrics that you need to achieve to know that you have likely achieved market traction? How do you displace strong incumbents in the market? This session will also provide several examples of products that have achieved great product-market fit.
Sessions by this speaker
Jun 6, 2020
09:00 AM
Building a Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
online
Learn what it takes to build a robust go to market strategy. Understand what it takes to build out customer personas. Develop a strong positioning and messaging strategy for your product. Understand where your customers congregate and learn how to target them with the right messages.

Liz Pearce, Fresh Chalk
Co-founder & CEO, Fresh Chalk(Jan 2019 - Till Now)
Liz Pearce is the co-founder and CEO of Fresh Chalk, site for sharing recommendations for local businesses and professionals with friends. Prior to Fresh Chalk, Liz was CEO of LiquidPlanner, a project management software company, and Chief Revenue Officer at Streem, a Portland-based augmented reality startup. Liz has served on the board of the UW Buerk Center for three years and is an active mentor and speaker in the Seattle entrepreneur community.
Sessions by this speaker
Jun 6, 2020
09:00 AM
Building a Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
online
Learn what it takes to build a robust go to market strategy. Understand what it takes to build out customer personas. Develop a strong positioning and messaging strategy for your product. Understand where your customers congregate and learn how to target them with the right messages.

Avni Patel Thompson, Modern Village
Founder and CEO, Modern Village(Nov 2019 - Till Now)
Avni is the founder and CEO of Modern Village. She is a third time founder building technology solutions for today’s parents. Her previous company Poppy (YC W16) helped connect parents to vetted caregivers when they had gaps in childcare. Prior to taking the entrepreneurial plunge, she spent over a decade building big consumer businesses at P&G, adidas and Starbucks. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSc Chemistry from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver, Canada with her husband and 2 little girls.
Sessions by this speaker
May 30, 2020
09:00 AM
How to Achieve Product Market Fit
online
Understand what it takes to navigate your product strategy to get to product-market fit. What is the methodology that you need to pursue product-market fit? What are the metrics that you need to achieve to know that you have likely achieved market traction? How do you displace strong incumbents in the market? This session will also provide several examples of products that have achieved great product-market fit.