Startup Lessons

Abstract

Steve Shwartz has been involved as an entrepreneur or investor in about 25 startups with outcomes ranging from wild successes to abject failures. This presentation will describe some of his successes and failures as both an entrepreneur and as investor. The presentation will focus on reasons why selected startups succeeded or failed and will present lessons learned from both the entrepreneur and investor perspective.

Biography:

Steve is a co-founder of Device42 which has created a software product used by hundreds of large enterprises in 30+ countries to manage their IT infrastructures.

Prior to Device42, Steve was at Tangoe where he was one of the early angel investors, a board member, and then CTO for 3 years. Tangoe was one of the top 10 IPO's of 2011 and is the global leader in telecom expense management.

Steve started his career as a postdoc at Yale University in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Computer Science Department and was a co-founder of two companies in the artificial intelligence area, one of which had an IPO in 1986 and the other raised a massive amount of venture capital before it failed.

In 1991, Steve developed Esperant, one of the leading business intelligence tools of the 1990's and was named Product of the Year by two major national industry publications in 1995. Steve sold the company to a major international software vendor. During the late-90's dotcom era, Steve was involved in a number of exciting startups, one of which attempted (and failed) to overtake OpenTable in the restaurant reservations space.

Steve is the author of a book on natural language processing, has spoken at dozens of industry and academic conferences, has published numerous trade and academic articles, and has received two patents. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University.

Steve has made investments in about 15 startups and is on the board of the Angel Investor Forum. He is also on the board of the Connecticut Technology Council and is the Chairperson of Marrakech Inc, a $40M non-profit agency that provides services to people with disabilities.