CarGurus Founder/CEO Langley Steinert

CarGurus is an automotive shopping website that uses data, technology, and community to help consumers find the best car deals from the best-rated car dealers. Founded in 2007 by Langley Steinert (also a co-founder of TripAdvisor), the company has grown to become the #1 most visited car shopping site in the US. CarGurus employs 250 at its Cambridge-MA headquarters and will open its first international office in Dublin in June, which will serve as a hub for the company’s European expansion. Watch this video and learn how Langley has quietly built two of the most successful consumer businesses in Boston, how lessons learned co-founding TripAdvisor shaped CarGurus, and other lessons you can apply to your startup.

SimpliSafe Founder/CEO Chad Laurans

SimpliSafe makes it easy for anyone to install a security system in their home or apartment with no technician required. An inexpensive monthly SaaS fee replaces long-term contracts. In short, SimpliSafe offers all the protection of a traditional security system with none of the problems, so it’s no surprise that SimpliSafe was #119 on the Inc 500 and recently raised $57M from Sequoia Capital.

Watch this video and learn how Chad has quietly built one of the most successful consumer businesses in Boston, how unconventional advertising on Marc Maron’s podcast and talk radio helped the company grow, and other lessons you can apply to your startup.

Drift Co-founder/CEO David Cancel

David Cancel is a five-time entrepreneur, two-time CEO, angel investor, and currently the CEO at Drift, a messaging app that makes it easier for businesses to talk to their customers. Prior to Drift, David was at HubSpot where he served as Chief Product Officer after HubSpot acquired his last company, Performable.

Join us to learn about David’s experience as a serial entrepreneur, lessons from his five times as a founder, how he rebuilt the product team at HubSpot to help fuel their rocketship ride, and other learnings you can apply to your startup.

TripAdvisor Founder/CEO Stephen Kaufer

Many believe Boston can’t do consumer tech startups. TripAdvisor proves them wrong.
TripAdvisor users have written 225M reviews for the service—compare that to Yelp’s community which has only generated 77M reviews. Over 190M people have downloaded one of TripAdvisor’s apps and nearly 50% of their traffic comes from mobile devices. CEO Stephen Kaufer and his 3,000+ employees have built a company that has evolved from “Web 2.0” to “Mobile First” while earning a $12B market cap, right here in Boston.

Watch this video to learn how he did it, what the future holds, and lessons you can apply to your startup!

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Founder Dialogues XII: Paul English, CEO & Co-Founder of Blade

Founder Dialogues XII- Paul English, CEO and Co-Founder of Blade, October 30th, 2014

We’re excited to announce that Paul English, CEO and co- founder of Blade and former CTO and Founder of Kayak, will be sharing his success story at Founder Dialogues XII on October 30th, 2014 at the Microsoft New England R&D Center from 6pm – 8pm.

Registration: Open to the public.

Paul English is CEO and Founder of Blade and KAYAK, a company which will co-found 2-3 consumer technologies startups each year in Boston.

Previously, Paul was CTO and Co-founder of KAYAK, and previous to that Paul was President of Boston Light Software, an ecommerce company sold to Intuit, where Paul then served as VP Technology.

Paul is a Director of Partners In Health and Village Health Works, both organizations providing quality health care to populations of extreme poverty.

Paul was briefly an entrepreneur in-residence at Greylock, a co-founder and Director of Intermute, the founder of GetHuman, the founder of the World Xiangqi League, cofounder and Chairman of Mancala, Inc., Senior Vice President of Engineering and Product Management at Interleaf. He also did contract programming for the US Air Force, operations research programming for Data General, programming for a medical device company, and even some video game software and sound-effect development.

Paul received a BS and MS in computer science from University of Massachusetts. Paul regularly lectures on entrepreneurship topics at Boston-area universities, and was named Chief Technology Officer of the year by Mass Technology Leadership Council in 2009. Paul has been an advisor to LinkedIn, ELERTS, FanSnap, Roost, and Pixable.

Please help us spread the word: tweet/ blog #fdialogues

Click here to Register

Limited Capacity: Please Register Early

Thanks to NEVCA and Microsoft for their support of Founder Dialogues

FD: XI Jeff Seibert & Wayne Chang of Crashlytics, March 11th, 2014

A special thank you to Crashlytics co-founders, Jeff Seibert & Wayne Chang, for sharing their fascinating founder journey with the Boston community.  

Jeff & Wayne provided the Founder Dialogues XI crowd with an insider look into their entrepreneurial careers and how they together became Crashlytics, which in January 2013 was acquired by Twitter.

Jeff explained his passion for deeply technical Internet software. Gaining previous experience at Apple and later as the co-founder and COO of Increo.

Wayne described his personal focus on user experience and building relationships with developers to help influence the future of mobile development. He shared his fascinating background in leadership roles at i2hub, Napster and Dropbox.

Together Jeff & Wayne have put together their skills and expertise to create an award-winning mobile crash reporting solution.

Thanks to returning and new participants. The Founder Dialogues event series is dedicated to celebrating entrepreneurial success within the Boston start-up community.  Please stay tuned for the announcement of our next speaker.  Our vision is to showcase local successes and inspire the Boston community to build the next generation of great start-up success stories.

We hope you enjoyed Jeff & Wayne’s story. Feel free to tweet any thoughts or comments using #fdialogues.     

 

Founder Dialogues XI – Jeff Seibert & Wayne Chang, Co- Founders of Crashlytics, March 11th, 2014

 Click here to Register 

We’re excited to announce that Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang, co- founders and of Crashlytics, will be kicking off the 2014 series and sharing their success story at Founder Dialogues XI on March 11th, 2014 at the Microsoft New England R&D Center from 6pm – 8pm.

Registration: Open to the public.

Serial-entrepreneurs Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang have successfully collaborated to fuel the future of mobile development in Boston’s back yard. These two young entrepreneurs co- founded the mobile crash reporting startup Crashlytics, which was acquired by social networking giant Twitter in January 2013 for nine figures. Both have spent the last two decades immersed in building and creating innovative technologies.

Jeff discovered his passion for entrepreneurship and programing at a young age, founding Arios Software while in high school in Baltimore, MD. He later went on to gain experience at Apple in both marketing and engineering capacities. In 2007, Jeff co-founded Increo and served as its COO and lead architect until its acquisition by Box in August of 2009. He subsequently oversaw the integration of Increo’s document preview and annotation technologies into the company’s cloud-based content platform.

Wayne is a serial entrepreneur, mentor, hacker, and angel investor. wayne has been passionate about technology from a very young age, writing his first software program on Apple lle at age 7. In college, he founded peer-to-peer file sharing platform i2Hub and was instrumental in the early stages of many top technology companies including Napster and Dropbox. He also serves as a mentor for TechStars, Extreme Startups and MassChallenge. Wayne is passionate about the user experience and building relationships with developers to help influence the future of mobile development. 

Please help us spread the word: tweet/ blog #fdialogues

Click here to Register

 

FD X: Steve Papa of Endeca, February 26th, 2013

A special thank you to Endeca‘s founder and former CEO, Steve Papa, for sharing his fascinating founder journey with the Boston community.  

Steve provided the Founder Dialogues X crowd with a unique glimpse into his firsthand experience being immersed in a rapidly advancing technological ecosystem.  He founded the enterprise software company Endeca in 1999 and was its CEO until it was Oracle’s 6th largest acquisition ever on announcement in 2011. Endeca pioneered Guided Navigation, one of the leading search innovations of the decade, and made it an industry standard online. 

Endeca’s name stems from the definition “serendipitous discovery” which symbolizes Steve’s breakthrough realization that organizing data, much like merchandise organization in physical stores, could increase a company’s revenue by 30% or more.  In 2003, Walmart.com became powered by Endeca and the legitimacy of the company’s success became tangible.

Thanks to returning and new participants, your contributions helped raise funds for BUILD Boston.  BUILD’s mission is to use entrepreneurship to excite and propel disengaged, low-income students through high school to college success.  The Founder Dialogues event series is dedicated to celebrating entrepreneurial success within the Boston startup community.  Please stay tuned for the announcement of our next speaker soon.  Our vision is to showcase local successes and inspire the Boston community to build the next generation of great startup success stories.

We hope you enjoy Steve’s story in the video capturing FD X along with the photos below.  Feel free to tweet any thoughts or comments using #fdialogues.