Kick-start Your New Year with Ace Bluesky Event and Venture Funding Workshops

With the year coming to an end, and most of us getting into the holiday mode and putting work in the back-burner, here is an event that can get you back into the grind next year. Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE) in conjunction with Sandbox network are bringing together the next Bluesky event.  It is a flagship event to celebrate and profile the spirit of entrepreneurship.

The event will feature award-winning Swiss entrepreneurs Dominik Grolimund, co-founder of Wuala (recently acquired by Lacie) and Antoine Verdon, CEO of Sandbox network, who will share about their innovative business models and success. Serial entrepreneur Guillaume Beauverd, CEO of G2 Ventures (invested in Poken and others) will also be giving his views as an activist investor operating in the European high tech and finance hub of Geneva.

The event will be held on Wednesday, January 20′th at SMU (Admin Building), Level 6, Function room. To register for the event, click here.

The event is supported by Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition and Swissnex.

Following the Bluesky event, There will be a dedicated workshop on topics related to venture funding. Here are the details of the workshop:

The day will consist of five workshops:
1. Building and Managing an Advisory Board by Antoine Verdon
2. Negotiating with VCs & Corporate Investors by Dominik Grolimund
3. Building and managing a professional network by Guillaume Beauverd
4. Selling to large corporations by Darius Cheung
5. Getting the critical decisions right by Adrian Chye

1. Building and Managing an Advisory Board by Antoine Verdon
Antoine Verdon works in Zurich as CEO of Sandbox and Global Head of Community. He has a Master of Law from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Passionate about politics, he was with 20 the youngest member ever of the Parliament of Lausanne, his home city. For Sandbox, a young Swiss start-up, he has put together a remarkable advisory board and he now came to Singapore to unfold the mystery of how to find the best board members possible.

2. Negotiating with VCs & Corporate Investors by Dominik Grolimund
Dominik Grolimund co-founder and CEO of Wuala, Swiss, is 29 years old and studied computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). When raising capital for Wuala, he negotiated with most of the large IT firms and talked to most of the well known VCs in Europe, Boston and the Silicon Valley. He will share his thoughts on presenting business ideas in an investor friendly way.

3. Building and managing a professional network by Guillaume Beauverd
CEO of G2 Ventures (an early state venture investment company), Guillaume is a serial entrepreneur and investor. At the age of 19 he co-founded Intermed Communication and Technologies, a small web-agency which developed an innovative content management system. In 2006 he founded Trace Golf SA, a technology start-up developing a breakthrough integrated tracking technology for golf. Since then he has been an activist investor in early stage start ups. Recent investments include Poken, ioVox and Doodski. Guillaume masters the art of professional networking and managing a social network and is delighted to teach you how to accelerate your networking success.

4. Selling to large corporations by Darius Cheung
Co-founder of tenCube, Darius Cheung studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at NUS in Singapore. In 2008 Darius has been named one of Asia’s most promising Young Entrepreneurs by businessweek. His company tenCube is a tech start-up in the mobile security space, that just successfully closed negotioations with SingTel and Nokia, two of the world’s most important heavyweights in the mobile industry. Darius will share his experience and teach you how to get your own deals done.

5. Getting the critical decisions right by Adrian Chye
Adrian is general manager at Media Freaks. He graduated with an Honours Degree in Engineering (Computer Engineering) and also holds a Degree of Master of Science in Technopreneurship and Innovation, obtained jointly from Nanyang Technological University and University of Washington. The company has successfully secured a significant funding round and is poised to succeed. Growing a business is about taking risks and making choices. In this workshop,the participants will come to appreciate how one decision can have an direct/indirect impact on the future growth of
the company. In that sense, there isn’t really a right or wrong decision. Participants who are interested in the digital media space would find this workshop most interesting.

For registration, please click here