It’s Kevin Hartz, Co-Founder & CEO of Eventbrite.

There’s a lot of reasons to love Kevin, and Eventbrite. To put it concisely, Eventbrite embodies Silicon Valley. The company, launched in 2006, helped anyone launch an event and sell tickets online, disrupting the event industry. It was initially funded by Kevin, but has since raised nearly $80 million from Sequoia Capital and some of the most prestigious angel investors in the Valley. And, now it’s expanding it’s reach to other languages and territories. We use Eventbrite to power ticketing for the Founder Showcase and over 300 other events per year across the globe with the Founder Institute, and we couldn’t be happier.

Eventbrite’s growth can only be described as a prototypical hockey stick. The company doubled its number of sellers in 2011, has now sold over 55 million tickets, and is reported to be heading towards an IPO in 2012.

Kevin also is very active in the startup ecosystem, investing in and advising tons of great startups; including PayPal, Geni, Friendster, Airbnb, Counsyl, Milo, Skybox Imaging, Palantir, Indinero, TripIt, Flixster, Adnectar, Yammer, TokBox, iControl, Boku, Lookout, Anonymizer, and Trulia. He is also a partner with Youniversity Ventures, a Special Technology Partner at Sequoia Capital, and an LP at The Founders Fund, and NEA. You can see the full list of his activities on KevinHartz.com

And finally, Kevin’s Co-Founder at Eventbrite is his wife, Julia Hartz. How cool is that?

We hope you’ll join us to hear Kevin discuss startups, innovation, and investing at the 10th Founder Showcase.

Get your tickets today.

It’s Dan Shapiro, Former Founder & CEO of Sparkbuy and Ontela.

We know Dan very well, as he’s one the most active, and highest rated, Mentors for the Founder Institute. Based in Seattle, Dan currently works at Google as a “kept entrepreneur” following the acquisition of his most recent company, Sparkbuy. Dan was the Founder and CEO of Sparkbuy, a comparison shopping website, and sold it to Google within 6 months of inception.

In fact, Dan recently gave a great talk about his experience, with advice on how to think about selling your startup, to the Seattle Founder Institute. The video is below – it’s a MUST WATCH.



Before Sparkbuy, Dan was the Founder and CEO of Ontela, a pioneering mobile imaging company, where he was named CEO of the Year by MobileBeat. Ontela was frequently recognized including the Dow Jones Top 10 in Wireless list, receiving the CTIA award for Best Social Networking Application, and being named Breakthrough Startup of the Year by the WTIA. Ontela merged with Photobucket in December of 2009 where Dan now holds a seat on the Board of Directors.

He now serves on the board of Bonanzle, an ecommerce company backed by Ignition, Matrix, and Voyager, and on the board of the nonprofit Washington Technology Industry Association. He has also invested in several startups, including Smore, Vizify, and Pathable. You can read his great blog about startups and entrepreneurship at DanShapiro.com.

We’re very excited to have Dan as a speaker, and we hope you’ll join us.

Get your tickets today.

Evelyn Rusli, Reporter, New York Times

Evelyn Rusli is a reporter at The New York Times. Previously she was an Anchor Reporter at TechCrunch and the Forbes Video Network, with nearly 200 television appearances, including on BBC, CNN and MSNBC. At Forbes, she interviewed top business leaders, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim, and filed reporting from the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland.

Ina Fried, Senior Editor, All Things Digital

Ina Fried is the Senior Editor for All Things Digital, where she authors the blog Mobilized. Prior to that, she was a senior staff writer for News.com. She is a frequent commenter on technology news on NPR and other print and broadcast outlets. In April of 2011, Ina scored an exclusive interview with CEO Steve Jobs and other Apple executives about the iPhone location tracking controversy.

Alexia Tsotsis, Writer, TechCrunch

Alexia Tsotsis is a writer for TechCrunch. Before TechCrunch, she ran the SFweekly.com website while covering the tech scene, and human behavior in the digital age. At TechCrunch, she covers early stage startups, and has interviewed everyone from Groupon’s Andrew Mason to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Most recently she made the Forbes “30 Under 30: Rising Stars of Media List.”



In addition, there are also journalists attending from The Next Web, BusinessWeek, Business Insider, and many more.

There are less than 75 tickets and tables left for next Thursday’s event. Get yours today before they sell out.

The 9th Founder Showcase is scheduled for January 19th at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, and for the first time will feature TheFunded.com’s Entrepreneur Investor Awards, where we will celebrate the best investors of 2011. All in all, this will be our most exclusive event yet – with just 175 tickets available to the general public.

Applications to the FREE Pitch Competition are open until December 31st, 2011, at http://foundershowcase.com/apply. Over $30mm has been raised by previous presenters, so apply now and start collecting votes.

These Investor Awards are not your average popularity contest. In fact, the main criteria are the 2011 ratings and reviews investors receive from the 17,000+ Founder and CEO members of TheFunded.com – the web’s largest community to rate and review startup investors. You could call it the “People’s Choice” awards – but we prefer to call it an “Entrepreneur Investor Awards.”

The awards up for grabs are;

1. Most Disruptive Investor: Reserved for an investor who consistently demonstrated an investment strategy in 2011 of supporting innovative companies with big aspirations to disrupt established markets.
2. Top Rated Investor in the Americas: Reserved for an investor who demonstrated an impressive track record in 2011, and received the highest acclaim from TheFunded.com’s members in 2011 across North, Central, and South America.
3. Top Rated Investor in Asia: Reserved for an investor who demonstrated an impressive track record in 2011, and received the highest acclaim from TheFunded.com’s members in 2011 across Asia.
4. Top Rated Investor in Europe, Middle East and Africa: Reserved for an investor who demonstrated an impressive track record in 2011, and received the highest acclaim from TheFunded.com’s members in 2011 across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
5. Best New Fund Manager: Reserved for a new investor in 2011 that received the highest acclaim from the TheFunded.com’s members, and who has immediately demonstrated savvy and a willingness to help promising entrepreneurs succeed.

We’ll be announcing the finalists shortly, so stay tuned.

Second, as part of the awards, we will have on-stage, interactive discussions with three of the top investors of 2011. These discussions will leverage input from attendees, and address critical new trends in startups and investing for 2012. So far we’ve confirmed Mike Maples, Jr., Managing Partner of FLOODGATE and early investor in Twitter, Digg, Chegg, and ng:moco, as our first speaker. The other two will be announced shortly.

Finally, the stakes for both our Pitch Competition and Demo Table Competition have been raised as well. Only 8 companies will compete in this Pitch Competition (versus the usual ten). And, there will now be three winners to the Demo Table Competition, who will each get to speed-pitch one of the Keynote speakers on stage in front of the audience.  Get your Demo Table today at http://foundershowcase.com/tables.

It all adds up to this being the most exclusive Founder Showcase ever. We hope you’ll join us.

Neo is an online lender that taps financial and social data to better evaluate creditworthiness and provide more affordable car loans. While current car loans rely solely on credit scores, Neo uses a more comprehensive approach to evaluate loan affordability. This enables better rates and significant savings over traditional loan sources – specifically the 84 million Gen Y consumers with limited or no credit history (which is 40% of the car buying population). They are currently funding auto loans as part of their private beta loan program.

Coming in an extremely close second place (they lost by one vote) was I-DISPO. I-DISPO is the largest community for sharing and booking appointments online. This Paris-based startup also recently secured a partnership with Bing in France to power all restaurant reservations directly on the search results page. At the event they also announced their entry into the U.S. market.

Winning the Demo Table Competition was Whit.li. Whit.li uses context-based pattern matching to enable companies to organize users based on compatibility to create a faster, more personalized online experience.

TechCrunch did a nice writeup of the event here.

Thanks to the over 500 people that joined us at the event! The next one is just around the corner.

At the event, 8 companies competed on stage in a free pitch competition, and taking the Grand Prize was Stefan Jorgensen and Itembase. A Graduate of the Berlin Founder Institute, Itembase is a personal inventory service that helps consumers track, manage, and sell the products they own. Here is the video of their winning pitch;

Coming in an extremely close second place was Yumvy. A Graduate of the Silicon Valley Founder Institute, Yumvy is a “GPS for cooking” that helps you easily and effeciently prepare recipes and entire meals. Chris Albrecht of GigaOm TV released a great video featuring Yumvy from the Founder Showcase - check it out here. 

Other companies who contended in the Pitch Competition were Blueseed, Einztein, Leaves, LendSocial, Paycento, and Talentina, and winning the Demo Table Competition was; 

• JetPac: An Ipad App that allows you to explore your friends’ best travel photos, and share the places you love, where you want to go, and where you’ve been.
  
• BrandAds.com: BrandAds is building the bridge between traditional and connected advertising.
• Sway Motorports: The Sway trike allows users to lean into turns like a motorcycle, but without the fear of falling over.

George Zachary, General Partner, Charles River Ventures

George Zachary joined Charles River Ventures in 2004, bringing more than 17 years of operating and investing experience in computing and consumer technology. Zachary focuses on building services and software technology companies, and he’s led CRV’s investments in Twitter, Yammer, Millennial Media, Cloudshare, Geni, SocialMedia, Metaplace, and Scribd (co-led with Bill Tai).

Noah J. Doyle, Managing Director, Javelin Venture Partners

Noah has founded, launched and grown dozens of tech companies in 20 years of entrepreneurship and management of innovation. He previously directed the enterprise product line for Google Earth and Google Maps, Marketing Strategy and Corporate Development at Keyhole, Inc., and was a co-founder of MyPoints.com, which underwent an IPO and acquisition by United Airlines.

David J. Blumberg, Managing Partner, Blumberg Capital

David Blumberg is the Managing Partner of Blumberg Capital. David has been investing in early stage technology companies for more than 24 years. His current investment focus includes Digital Media, Social Media, Mobility, SaaS/Technology Enabled Services and Internet.

Rob Coneybeer, Managing Director, Shasta Ventures

Rob is a Co-founder and Managing Director of Shasta Ventures. Rob is particularly interested in Mobile & Wireless, Technology Applications, and Infrastructure. Prior to Shasta, he was a partner at New Enterprise Associates, where he led 15 investments. He also helped build the first EchoStar spacecraft at Martin Marietta.

Brian Ascher, Partner, Venrock

Brian focuses on a broad range of Internet (both consumer and B2B) and Healthcare IT investments, and currently serves on the Boards of several private companies, including Vocera, Awarepoint, Retail Solutions, Inrix, and Billfloat. Past investments include ADiFY, DATAllegro, Redbeacon, RelayHealth and Unicru – all of which were acquired. Prior to Venrock he was a Senior Product Manager at Intuit.



Thanks to everyone who attended! The next event will take place on July 25th in San Francisco, and tickets will go on sale shortly.