Last night, the Leeds Entrepreneurs Alliance held an impressive event at the Hotel Boulderado. They brought together an all-star lineup from Boulder’s startup & venture capital community, which included Brad Feld (from the Foundry Group -- keynote speaker), Jim Franklin (SendGrid), Alexander Vogenthaler (Google), Bob Richards (Open Water Ventures), Nicole DeBoom (Skirt Sports), and many more.
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These are probably some of the most time-starved individuals in the area, but they generously gave an evening of their time to meet & mentor a group of about 80 aspiring CU student-entrepreneurs.
I arrived in time to see some of the breakout sessions, where small groups of around 20 students were able to interact with panels of 3 or 4 seasoned entrepreneurs & venture capitalists.
[ibimage==24012==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-left]There was no fluff. The advice & lessons from real-life experience that these students received was, in many ways, priceless.
Imagine having an opportunity to sit down with a VC who is willing to tell you what red flags they look for when doing their due diligence on a startup. Or to learn about how a former Techstars company very nearly lost an opportunity to sell their company because of an oversight regarding the documentation of ownership for the core software that their product was based on -- and how you can avoid making that same mistake.
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This wasn’t the kind of information you
typically learn from textbooks in your average business school. And that's a telling element about the mission of the Leeds Entrepreneur's Alliance's (LEA). If you're not already familiar with the organization, it's an alliance of undergraduate & graduate students in the Leeds Scool of Business. They've constructed "a series of coordinated & interconnected events that will begin to demystify the process of building a business." Networking opportunities are one of their core goals, and you could tell that the attendees recognized this event for the truly rare opportunity it was.
I wonder how many future Colorado startup community leaders were in that room last night...
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