Venture Capital, Entrepreneurs and the Current Climate – Who is being successful and why

CreativeCapital is back for yet another year to bring together the best and brightest in their fields to discuss the hot topics of the day.
2011 has left the corporate world still struggling financially as the current climate is posing significant challenges for investments in all industries and especially the creation, survival and growth of SMEs.
Is there a vital need for innovative solutions? Is there a role for VCs and non-traditional sources of funding? Who is being successful and why?
Join us for CreativeCapital to discuss how promising 2012 will be and hear inspiring VC and Entrepreneurship success stories.
Our guest speakers include Stephen Rockman Founder of Merism Capital & Co-Founder at Hub Venture Labs, Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, a young serial entrepreneur and founder of the Startup Genome and Scott Sage.
This event will be held @ Hospital Club, Forest Room, on Tuesday 24 January, from 7.30pm onwards. Don't forget to RSVP here!
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Stephen Rockman is Founder of MerismCapital. Merism Capital provides seed funding for early stage social businesses: supporting entrepreneurs with equity investments of £50k to £150k for both financial and social returns. Stephen founded Merism in 2010 having discovered social enterprise’s challenges and opportunities whilst mentoring entrepreneurs for NESTA and UnLtd. In 2011 he co-founded Hub Venture Labs, based in Hub Westminster, the first incubator in Europe dedicated to investing in and creating better, more sustainable social entrepreneurs and championing innovation and impact across Europe. Previously Stephen spent twenty years in IT in various commercial roles with global software and services companies before becoming an advisor to and angel investor in start-up web and mobile companies in the UK, Europe and Israel. He is a guest lecturer in social investment at Goldsmiths College, where he also sat on the advisory group for the new MA in Social Entrepreneurship, and holds a number of non-exec roles in early stage companies and continues to mentorentrepreneurs.

Bjoern Lasse Herrmann is the 26 year-old founder of the Startup Genome. One year ago he & his team set out to find a scalable way to accelerate businesses across the world. After releasing two research reports on success & failure of startups that were downloaded 25,000 times he most recently released the first software product that is best described as a virtual mentor for now more than 13,000 software businesses. The published research has been adopted by morethan 50 universities globally - including Stanford and Berkeley. Harvard Business School Professor Thomas Eisenmann called the findings an important contribution. You can try the product at startupcompass.co and learn more about the research at blog.startupcompass.co. Before, Bjoern founded and led 4 for and non profit ventures in Germany, Bangladesh & the US. He also worked as an executive in Russia for one year for a mid sized marketing company. His personal passion or "leitmotif" is: unleashing human potential. His higher purpose is to strive to maximize the capitalization of every single individual.

Scott Sage is an Associate at DFJ Esprit. Scott’s current areas of interest at DFJ Esprit include mobile, consumer and enterprise companies. DFJ Esprit is a leading cross-stage venture capital firm with just under $1 billion under management that invests in European technology companies. The DFJ Esprit partners have invested and helped build many of the most successful venture companies starting in Europe of recent years, including RadiumOne, LOVEFiLM, Apatech, Buy.at, and KVS. Previously, Scott worked in marketing, business development, finance and research roles at Smarkets, BVCA and UBS. He is currently a board observer at Taptu and Redkite and has advised and invested into other consumer internetcompanies in Europe. Scott is one of the co-founders of City Meets Tech where he helps start-ups find the right mentors and seed capital.