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.

Video: The Golden Tweet

Video: The Arcane

CreativeCapital – The Golden Tweet

With its simplicity of communication, Twitter stormed into a highly populated arena and took everything and everyone in its sway. With 50 million active users every day, it has been used as a marketing tool around the world and helped turn around declining business. And this is not all: in 2011 Twitter played a pivotal role in the Arab spring and London riots, with its 140 characters of power.

From Patrick Tresset's tweeting Aikon robot, to Watkins Books' turnaround, and the role of digital media in politics, join us for an evening where our guests will have more than 140 characters to say about their Twitter experiences.

This event will be held @ Hospital Club, Tuesday 22 November, from 7.30pm onwards. Don't forget to RSVP here.

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SPEAKERS:

Patrick Hayes is a political commentator for current affairs magazine spiked, an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. He also works part-time as head of press and promotions at the think-tank the Institute of Ideas and is a columnist for the Huffington Post and Free Society. He is a producer of the international Battle of Ideas festival, which he helped to establish in 2005. Previously he was head of research and development at TSL Education, publishers of The TES and Times Higher Education. Patrick regularly comments on politics and current affairs for a range of local, national and international media programmes, which have included Newsnight, Sunday Morning Live, BBC Radio 5 Live, Sky News, Russia Today and BBC London.

Etan Ilfeld is a London-based entrepreneur and the owner of Watkins Books, London's oldest spiritual bookshop. He will be talking about the apps Watkins Books is developing. And Hugh Thomas will talk about how Watkins Books has been so successful at building a following community.

Patrick Tresset is currently a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. After an interruption of almost seven years in his artistic practice, Tresset has found his medium of expression by diverting his on-going academic research he conducts in collaboration with Prof. Frederic Fol Leymarie from the Department of Computing. Their Aikon-II project investigates the sketching activity through computational modelling and robotics.

Video: Reaching Out Through Art

CreativeCapital Reaching Out Through Art from CreativeCapital - Events on Vimeo.

CreativeCapital – The Arcane

The sum total of our knowledge is limited by the band-width of our imagination. There are many things we know and many things we don't. Rational Science often finds itself in a position of proving facts that the ancients took for granted and had come to understand through different channels - take Plato's view on Atomic matter for example, or the Ancient understanding of the Earths relationship to the Sun.

Creative Capital seeks to promote knowledge, understanding and exchange and in October we will be exploring outside of the usual box. We will be exploring The Arcane.

Join us for a conversation with the owner of Watkins Book - London's foremost bookshop focused on the Arcane, an expert in Chess, and Sex with Robots – a Celtic mythology expert and an expert in the magic of the theatre.

A warming topic for the dark months of Winter, just before All Hallows Eve at the end of October.

Etan Ilfeld is a member of the Hospital Club and the owner of London's oldest esoteric bookshop, Watkins Books, established in 1893. Ilfeld is also editor in chief of the Watkins Review: Mind Body Spirit magazine, which is distributed internationally and provides an annual ranking of the 100 most spiritually influential people. Ilfeld aims to bring spirituality into the virtual spheres and has created an interactive crowd sourcing map of spiritual events across the globe. Watkins is also launching a series of mind, body and spirit apps.

David Levy is a Scottish International Master of chess, a businessman noted for his involvement with computer chess and artificial intelligence, and the founder of the Computer Olympiads and the Mind Sports Olympiads. He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers. Levy also wrote Love and Sex With Robots, published in the United States by HarperCollins, and forthcoming from Duckworth in the UK. Levy predicts that sex robots will hit the market within a couple of years.

John Matthews is the author of over 90 books including The Encyclopedia of Celtic Myth and Legend. He has published numerous books of alternative history on Ceremonial magic, Celtic mythology, Neoshamanism, and New Age beliefs. John worked as historical consultant on Jerry Bruckheimer's film King Arthur. He lives in Oxford, England. He has also recently created a new tarot deck, the Greenwood Tarot.

Nina Steiger is Associate Director at Soho Theatre and leads the Writers' Centre there. Prior to this post, Nina worked for seven years in the New York and regional theatres with such organisations as Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York Stage & Film and Hartford Stage Company alongside freelance work with companies such as The Foundry Theatre, Roundabout Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club.

CreativeCapital Reaching Out Through Art

Art in whatever context, form or medium can be an indispensable tool to cope with our feelings, dreams and perceptions, helping us to channel positive or negative emotions into the anonymous open.

Man is a visual animal! Long before sound, smell, feel or taste reach our brain, the visual impulse is absorbed and processed! More than any other sensation a picture can imprint itself onto our mind as an undeletable memory of joy or sadness, delight or horror.

This is why images have been one of the oldest, most powerful forms of communication, reaching us even today through sparse rock and cave drawings by early man to the onslaught by modern media in a globally visualised world.

Long before psychiatry in modern medicine rediscovered art and music as a way of dealing and possibly treating traumata and transient and permanent mental disorders, men has been aware of the inspiring, soothing, healing and soul expanding power of art and sound from ancient religious ceremonies to the integration of art and music into our primary school curricula.

Cameroonian artist Adjani Okpu-Egbe, who has fought the severe emotional effects of physical uprooting, displacement, rejection and isolation, has found art and writing as the outlet for his frustrations and unbroken energy saving him from self-destruction. He feels that recent events ‘could be a tragic, ironic cry for help. An aggressive call for many more scouts to be ejaculated into our street to scavenge for talents, a call for mentors, a cry for the provision of many more easily accessible and affordable means of expression and education! As a self-taught expressionist artist, what I want to say is that there is HOPE in my department.’

The Koestler Trust, the UK’s best-known prison arts charity, has always worked on the principle that – ‘to make our society safer, it pays to channel offenders’ energies to positive ends, to build their self-worth and help them learn new skills. The arts are an especially effective way of engaging with offenders who feel alienated from mainstream education and employment, and there is growing evidence that the arts can help in changing offenders’ lives.'

This event will be held @ Hospital Club, Friday 23 September, from 7.30pm onwards. Don't forget to RSVP here.

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