Stephen McConnell Case is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist best known as the former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). Case joined AOL's predecessor company, Quantum Computer Services, as a marketing vice-president in 1985, became CEO of the company in 1991, and, at the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, orchestrated with Gerald M. Levin the merger that created AOL Time Warner, described as "the biggest train wreck in the history of corporate America."
Trend Micro Inc. is an American-Japanese cyber security software company. The company has globally dispersed R&D in 16 locations across every continent excluding Antarctica. The company develops enterprise security software for servers, containers, and cloud computing environments, networks, and end points. Its cloud and virtualization security products provide automated security for customers of VMware, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Benchmark is a venture capital firm founded in 1995 by Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, Kevin Harvey, and Val Vaden.
A business incubator is an organization that helps startup companies and individual entrepreneurs to develop their businesses by providing a fullscale range of services, starting with management training and office space, and ending with venture capital financing. The National Business Incubation Association (NBIA) defines business incubators as a catalyst tool for either regional or national economic development. NBIA categorizes its members' incubators by the following five incubator types: academic institutions; non-profit development corporations; for-profit property development ventures; venture capital firms, and a combination of the above.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
Anthony Hsieh was an American internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He retired as the CEO of the online shoe and clothing company Zappos in August 2020 after 21 years. Prior to joining Zappos, Hsieh co-founded the Internet advertising network LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million.
Zappos.com is an American online shoe and clothing retailer based in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. The company was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn and launched under the domain name Shoesite.com. In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in an all-stock deal worth around $1.2 billion at the time. Amazon purchased all of the outstanding shares and warrants from Zappos for 10 million shares of Amazon's common stock and provided $40 million in cash and restricted stock for Zappos employees.
Constant Contact, Inc. is an online marketing company, headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, with additional offices in Loveland, Colorado; and New York, New York.
Zimride by Enterprise Holdings was an American carpool program that matched inter-city drivers and passengers through social networking services. It was offered to universities and businesses as a matchmaking service. The company was founded in May 2007. After the launch of the Lyft app in May 2012 for intra-city rides, the Lyft app rapidly grew and became the focus of the company. Zimride officially renamed as Lyft in May 2013, and the Zimride service was sold to Enterprise Holdings in July 2013. As of July 2013, the service had over 350,000 users and had partnerships with Facebook and Zipcar.
Turo Inc. is an American peer-to-peer carsharing company based in San Francisco, United States. The company allows private car owners to rent out their vehicles via an online and mobile interface in four countries and new corporate owners to rent out their cars in France in addition to the four previous countries.
Zagster was a venture-funded startup company based in Boston, Massachusetts that designed, built and operated bike sharing programs for cities, universities, corporate campuses, hotels, and residential communities across the United States. As of July 2019, it operated over 200 bike sharing programs. The bicycle program was suspended in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then the company terminated all operations in June 2020.
MicroVentures is an equity crowdfunding website that offers investments in early stage companies. It connects accredited investors with startups, businesses and services looking to raise funds or participate in select secondary market opportunities.
SendGrid is a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email. The company was founded by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, and incubated through the Techstars accelerator program. As of 2017, SendGrid has raised over $81 million and has offices in Denver, Colorado; Boulder, Colorado; Irvine, California; Redwood City, California; and London.
RidePal offers corporate luxury commute bus services for companies and individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Fred Mossler is a business executive, fashion guru, and philanthropist. He is best known as a former high-ranking executive at online shoe retailer Zappos, where he played a significant role in the company’s growth, as well as being the founder of Las Vegas-centric investment fund Honus Capital, LLC and co-founder of luxury fashion brand Ross and Snow.
Kevin Henrikson is a San Francisco-based engineer, speaker, and investor. Henrikson has worked for or headed several companies, such as Zimbra, Alpha Brand Media and Acompli.
In business, a unicorn is a startup company valued at over US$1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market. The term was first published in 2013, coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.
Rocket Internet SE is a German Internet company headquartered in Berlin. The company builds startups and owns shareholdings in various models of internet retail businesses. The company model is known as a startup studio or a venture builder.
Alfred, also known as Hello Alfred, is a resident management software application that enables real estate developers and property managers to provide in-home services and experiences to their residents. Residents in Alfred buildings are assigned a personal home manager, or Alfreds, who are W-2 company employees, and can make requests in the company's app. The Alfred platform integrates with Real Page, Yardi and Entrata so that building management teams can operate their buildings through a single platform.
Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is an American seed accelerator launched in January 2011.
