Career
Kramer started his career as sports writer for the Village News and the Coatesville Record. He left sports writing in 1983 and joined Berkheimer Associates to become a tax administrator. While working for Berkheimer Associates, Kramer started a part-time marketing business called Kramer Marketing. His firm client, the Downingtown Marketplace, hired Kramer to be assistant manager in 1984.
During his time at the Downingtown Marketplace, Kramer started the Downingtown Antique Hub, a small business center and a mirrored closet store business. Kramer left the Downingtown Marketing place in 1987 to become the first executive director of the Penn State Technology Development Center in Great Valley, Pa, which he grew from one company to 53 and lead the nation in minority startup companies.
In 1990, Kramer left the Penn State Technology [7] to start the Eastern Technology Council, which was the second largest technology council in the United States. During his time with ETC, he started the Pennsylvania Private Investors Group and a national newspaper, Technology Times.
Kramer started Kramer Communications, a marketing and new venture development consultancy in 1997. While running Kramer Communications, he started PA Artist Entrepreneur in 2003, [8] co-founded in 2003 with his then wife, Jacqueline Kramer, Expert Speakers, [9] [10] marketing business professionals to trade associations and corporations and was sold to Speaker Match in 2005, Prompt Payment, which provided reverse factoring service, in 2007, and Commercial Deposit Insurance, [11] which insures small business bank accounts against cyber theft of funds, in 2012.
Kramer is the executive director of the Private Investors Forum and runs the Angel Venture Fair, which draws entrepreneurs from all over the world to present their business plans to angel investors.
Kramer is the executive director of the Angel Venture Fair, [12] which brings together entrepreneurs and investors from around the world, and formerly Executive-in-Residence at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pa. [13]
Kramer has taught marketing, entrepreneurship, marketing, management and family business at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business, Temple University Fox School of Business, Drexel University LeBow School of Business, University of Louisville in Panama City, Panama, Universidad de Pacifico in Lima, Peru, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia, Rutgers University Rohrer College of Business at Rowan University and VinUniversity in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Marc launched a podcast in March of 2020 featuring business book authors around the world, The Best Business Minds. This podcast won The Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts-2022 Communicator Awards Distinction Series-Business Podcasts, and has listeners in 75 countries. [14]
Currently, Kramer is the Senior Lecturer of Entrepreneurship and Co-Director of the Master's in Business Administration program at VinUniversity in Hanoi, Vietnam.
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc.. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Joseph "Yossi" Vardi is an Israeli entrepreneur and investor. He is one of Israel's first high-tech entrepreneurs, one of the pioneers of the Israeli internet industry. For over 47 years, he has founded and helped to build over 85 high-tech companies in a variety of fields, among them software, energy, Internet, mobile, electro-optics and water technology.
Inc. is an American business magazine founded in 1979 and based in New York City. The magazine publishes six issues per year, along with surrounding online and social media content. The magazine also produces several live and virtual events yearly.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Christopher Sacca is an American venture investor, company advisor, entrepreneur, and lawyer. He is the proprietor of Lowercase Capital, a venture capital fund in the United States that has invested in seed and early-stage technology companies such as Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, and Kickstarter, investments that resulted in his placement as No. 2 on Forbes' Midas List: Top Tech Investors for 2017. Sacca held several positions at Google Inc., where he led the alternative access and wireless divisions and worked on mergers and acquisitions. Between 2015 and 2020, he appeared as a "Guest Shark" on ABC's Shark Tank. In early 2017, Sacca announced that he was retiring from venture investing. In 2021, Sacca announced that he was back into venture investing with a focus on Climate issues.
An angel investor is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. Angel investors often provide support to startups at a very early stage, once or in a consecutive manner, and when most investors are not prepared to back them. In a survey of 150 founders conducted by Wilbur Labs, about 70% of entrepreneurs will face potential business failure, and nearly 66% will face this potential failure within 25 months of launching their company. A small but increasing number of angel investors invest online through equity crowdfunding or organize themselves into angel groups or angel networks to share investment capital and provide advice to their portfolio companies. The number of angel investors has greatly increased since the mid-20th century.
Robert Warren Pittman is an American businessman. Pittman was the CEO of MTV Networks and the cofounder and programmer who led the team that created MTV, and is the cofounder of iHeartMedia and Casa Dragones Tequila. Pittman joined iHeartMedia's predecessor company Clear Channel in November 2010 as an investor and the company's Chairman of Media and Entertainment Platforms, was named CEO in 2011 and chairman in 2013. Pittman led Clear Channel's transformation into iHeartMedia, Inc. in September 2014 to reflect its new multiplatform business and expanded mission. Pittman has also been the former chairman and CEO of Clear Channel Outdoor, CEO of AOL Networks, Six Flags Theme Parks, Quantum Media, Century 21 Real Estate and Time Warner Enterprises, and COO of America Online, Inc. and AOL Time Warner.
Trish Costello is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and investor. She is the Founder and CEO of Portfolia, a collaborative equity investing platform. She was named as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2014 by Goldman Sachs and Top Ten Women to Watch in Tech in 2015 by Inc magazine. She is recognized internationally for her pioneering work in educating and preparing venture capital investment partners, through the Kauffman Fellows Program. As the founding CEO and CEO Emeritus of the Center for Venture Education, she led the Kauffman Fellows Program for its first ten years. Costello was on the start-up team of the Kauffman Foundation's entrepreneurship center, where for eight years she directed its efforts in venture capital, angel investing, entrepreneur support programs, and programming to accelerate high potential women entrepreneurs. She played a leading role nationally in obtaining greater financial equity investments in women's businesses and in funding initiatives supporting high-growth women entrepreneurs.
Randy Haykin is an entrepreneur, angel investor, venture capitalist and philanthropist who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Haykin founded and runs The Gratitude Network, a 501c3 not-for-profit that provides coaching services to social entrepreneurs around the world.
Rosalind Resnick is an American filmmaker, real estate investor, journalist, author and entrepreneur credited with the creation of opt-in email, a permission-based form of email marketing. She has served on the advisory board of several companies and nonprofits, including the Girl Scouts of Greater New York, the American Red Cross of New York and Do Something, a not-for-profit whose mission is to motivate children to become active in their communities.
Cyriac Roeding is a Silicon Valley-based German-American entrepreneur and investor. He serves as the co-founder and CEO of Earli, an early cancer detection and treatment firm based in Redwood City, California. Earli is based on Synthetic Biopsy technology from Stanford University, and is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Casdin Capital, Sands Capital, Menlo Ventures, ZhenFund (China) and Marc Benioff. Roeding is also a co-founder and chairman of the board of Rewind Co., a diabetes type 2 reversal company. Roeding's venture investing focuses on AI, brain-to-machine interfaces, consumer businesses, biology meeting software and engineering, and consumer robotics. He served as EVP at Paramount Global / CBS, where he started the division CBS Mobile and brought it to profitability, and as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins and its iFund with Apple Inc., where he co-founded and led mobile shopping app shopkick with $22M of venture capital to a $250M cash acquisition by SK Telecom/SK Planet and 20 million users. Shopkick rewards users for just walking into retail stores such as Target Corporation, Best Buy, Macy's and Walmart and engaging with products from Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, L'Oreal etc., driving over $1B in sales annually for its partners. Fast Company ranked shopkick one of the world's 10 Most Innovative Companies In Retail, alongside Apple and Starbucks, and Entrepreneur Magazine placed Roeding on its cover.
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Marc B. Nathanson is an American entrepreneur who has served as the United States ambassador to Norway since 2022. He is best known for his founding of Falcon Cable, which he sold in 1999 for $3.7 billion. He is a member of the Cable TV Hall of Fame, awarded with Inc.s Entrepreneur of the Year and a former chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. In 2008, his net worth was listed as $1.1 billion by Forbes Magazine in their annual The World's Billionaires listing; as of 2021, he no longer made the list.
Scott Fox is an American financial and self-help author, specializing in entrepreneurship and startup company advice. He is a serial Internet entrepreneur, startup advisor, media personality, and angel investor. Founder of the OC Startup Council, the Click Millionaire's MasterMinds Forum at ClickMillionaires.com, and RadioGuestList.com among many other niche website businesses, Fox is best known for his books which have been translated into many languages worldwide. These include Internet Riches: The Simple Money-making Secrets of Online Millionaires, E-Riches 2.0, and Click Millionaires: Work Less, Live More with an Internet Business You Love.
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David Albert Friedberg is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and angel investor. He founded and was chief executive of The Climate Corporation, whose $1.1 billion sale to Monsanto in 2013 made it the first unicorn in the emerging agricultural technology space. He is founder and CEO of The Production Board (TPB). He is a co-host of the All-In podcast, alongside David Sacks, Jason Calacanis & Chamath Palihapitiya. Spanning his career, he has contributed to 32 patents.
