Brilliant Sole Jeff Guard

CES 2020 Zahava Stroud of Angel Launch

You're listening to Trade Show Live On the Road, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors and trade show industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries from healthcare to consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of the Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live.

Janet (00:28):

We're at CES 2020 looking ahead to another exciting decade of innovation and consumer electronics development. However, you can't do it without money. So with me right now is the founder of Angel Launch, Zahava Stroud. Zahava welcome to Trade Show Live at CES 2020.

Zahava (00:50):

Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Janet (00:52):

Now we're on the first day of the show for us, which is Tuesday. However, Zahava you've been busy; you've already done a number of things at CES. So tell me a little bit about Angel Launch and what you were up to yesterday.

Zahava (01:06):

Sure. So our website is angellaunch - l a u n c h - .com and we are a leading producer of investment forums, summits and networking events in Silicon Valley. We produce events almost every week connecting startups to investors from around the world. They consist of networking receptions, hitch nights, demo showcases, venture forums, and one of our most popular ones is called backyard capital, where we do a monthly reception in a private home in a very elite area of Silicon Valley where we get 150 startups and investors for informal networking. The goal of these events has been to connect investors to promising startups through deal-making and many startups from around the world have received millions in funding. Yesterday we produced an annual conference at CES; we do every year for over 10 years, called Silicon Valley Funding Summit. And it's a one day conference where we bring in startups from around the world. We bring in investors ranging from millions to a hundred million in funds looking for promising startups. We do a full day of networking, pitching and a demo showcase was very successful. The startups met a lot of great investors and in fact serves told me that they now have been funded from our past events, which is very exciting.

Janet (02:26):

Oh, we love hearing about people getting money. Now she may sound like it's got a singular focus, consumer electronics, but really we've got everything here from the health tech to virtual reality to toys and games and all kinds of silly stuff to very, very serious things. I'm curious as a Angel Launch person putting together people who have ideas with people who can fund them, are you agnostic to, you don't really care what kind of business it is or are you in any particular area?

Zahava (03:01):

So the great thing is that what we do is we produce live events. We don't actually invest. We connect startups to accredited investors and we cover all markets. In the last two months we get a FinTech event. We did quite a few on health tech, life science and medical devices, automotive and connected cars, enterprise and consumer applications, AI, deep tech, machine learning. We cover all markets. And what we found is that there's such a huge community of people traveling to the Bay area who don't live there, that we can do events almost every week and we can get several hundred people, those startups and investors who attend, but at least 40% don't live in the Bay area. They're just traveling through for meetings or deals, so we're a great resource for them to meet other people.

Janet (03:49):

Tell me about the investing or the vetting of the investors. Do you require that ultimately they invest in something? How do you prove that they have the money they say they have to fund people?

Zahava (04:03):

so we don't do rigorous due diligence since we're an event producer. What we do is we ask investors and we rely on their self representation that they are accredited investors. If we don't know, then we ask them for some types of documentation such as websites, LinkedIn profile, angel list profile, or people that we know and then we rely on their representation. And so far we haven't had any issues with that because again, the events are free or low cost. And the whole point is to connect people to investors. Many of the investors also are syndicated, which is very common. Maybe they'll get 10 or 20 investors who invest a small amount in a deal. So we often find that angels come to our events, refer their friends to startups. In fact, I just met a startup that pitched at an event a year ago and then recently met an investor who was at a different event, but one of the investors he met knew of the startup and said they'd be great for you, connected them. And now he's a board of advisor and investor in this startup because they had all attended two different events in the Bay area. Networking is the number one place that startups make deals. So that's why it's important to go to as many events as you can.

Janet (05:10):

I'm curious about the startups themselves. Do they just come into it cold and learn by the school of hard knocks, how to pitch? They've come to you with that experience or is this a great place for them to learn those skills?

Zahava (05:22):

So we don't do any training or there are many resources that do and we have many partners that offer training. For instance, at our backyard capital, which is held on a Thursday, we offer a free training by someone who's a mentor on Wednesday nights for anyone who's pitching to come and learn. So if someone asks me for training, we have many other resources in the Bay area where you can go and learn about how to pitch. But one reason people come is to see other people pitch. Because of course when you live in the Bay area and you're pitching all the time or going to events, you have a much higher level of presentation and you know what investors inspect. So we find it's very helpful for people who never pitched to get an idea of what they should be doing. We use that as a learning process.

Janet (06:04):

You know, when I think about pitching, I think about it being elevator pitch, you know, tell me 30 seconds. But generally, how long do people have to pitch their ideas at your events?

Zahava (06:13):

So before my current life, I was a trial attorney and I was used to being in court with the judges who had a very limited attention span. I was used to pitching, you know, a lawsuit. That's where millions of dollars I had two minutes. So I tell all my startups, pretend that you are pitching for your life and you have two to four minutes to convince someone that they should invest in you because you're actually pitching for millions of dollars. So most of our pitches are three to five minutes because they're in front of a stage. We tell startups you need to learn to have, to have an elevator pitch so that when people want to meet with you, then you can do the extensive dialogue in the PowerPoint slides and the more extensive presentation. But you should have a very charming, with a short pitch to get their initial attention.

Janet (06:57):

You know, sometimes technology can be, uh, kind of boring or a little over people's heads. And yet those could be the billion dollar ideas. Do you find that folks that are successfully landing funding that they really do bring a presence to the stage?

Zahava (

CES 2020 Jennifer Capps NCSU

Season 2, Episode 6

CES 20 Jennifer Capps, NCSU

Matt Kruea (00:00):

You're listening to Trade Show Live on the Road!, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries, from healthcare to consumer products. And everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live.

Janet Kennedy (00:28):

Janet Kennedy: (00:28)
Trade Show Live is on the road at CES 2020 we are in Eureka Park, which is where all the startups are and we happen to have a number of startups with us, with a very strong NC State tie. So we brought in one of our honor guests here today, Jennifer Capps, who's a leader in the entrepreneurship program at NC State to talk about her impressions of CES and where she feels NC State's ecosystem of entrepreneurship would fall. So Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer Capps (00:59):

Thank you so much for having me here today.

Janet Kennedy (01:01):

Okay, I bet you're sort of like freaking out at your first experience at CES.

Jennifer Capps (01:05):

I am. This is like the world's biggest playground for entrepreneurship and innovation. Nerds like myself. This is amazing. How can you just walk down an aisle and not be super inspired? You absolutely can't. I keep getting distracted.

Speaker 2 (01:19):

If I'm going to meet someone, I had to make myself pull away from some of these booths because the ideas are just phenomenal. You know, this is the ultimate shiny object syndrome issue except in Eureka park or think where it's like 2000 different businesses ideas, just amazingly overwhelming. Oh absolutely. But outside come coming from NC State and working with our students, they overwhelm me in the exact same way. I get the absolute privilege to work with students from all across the university and one of our intro level classes and these students are very new to this world of innovation and entrepreneurship in many ways, therefore is to go out and study markets and identify pain points that could become entrepreneurial opportunities. And then very quickly they proposed solutions. Well when I come to a place like this and I see so many of the ideas that students have proposed in the last few years, showing up at CES in some way, that is such a powerful tool for me to take back into the classroom to inspire them and all of a sudden this becomes something that's aspirational for them.

Janet Kennedy (02:27):

Do you feel like students are coming in a little more hardwired to think about themselves as entrepreneurs or owners of businesses?

Jennifer Capps (02:35):

I do. In many ways students are coming in knowing the word entrepreneurship and knowing that it sounds really cool. They're open to exploring the idea of entrepreneurship. What many of them don't understand is one, the work that goes into it, you know, in many ways they have sort of the shark tank view or they think, I just have to have a great idea and get up in front of national TV and people will fund me. So we about the steps that it takes and we talk about the fact that it's okay to fail as long as you do so for the right reasons. We talk about pivots, you know, it's so interesting that entrepreneurial pivot is a generally accepted principle here. We've already talked to dozens of companies represented here who talk about the pivots that they've made because of information they received at CES, but as individuals we often don't give ourselves the same permission to pivot in our career choices.

Jennifer Capps (03:26):

And I think that's one of the things that I work with our entrepreneurship students on. I think that's one of the interesting things too about coming even when you're not 100% ready, but you're still flexible enough to rethink. An example is NC State grads who founded brilliant soul came last year thinking this is a gaming thing. Now what they, what brilliant soul is for those folks who haven't listened to Jeff guard's podcast is basically an insole that has haptic technology in it and sensors that they envisioned using for VR and gaming purposes. Well, they got a ton of feedback from the biggest names in footwear last year and they haven't pivoted. They have expanded how they've developed their product. So now they're thinking about how does it apply to healthcare? How does it apply to other types of non-gaming functions? They even had a podiatrist who's a Colonel in the U S army stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina helped them with very specifically redesigning from some of her perspectives in a military environment.

Jennifer Capps (04:34):

So I'm absolutely so proud of them for not thinking, Hey, people didn't want my product. They recognize that input that the product needed to evolve to grab the market. That was one of the most impressive things to me as well about that company, how open they are to making these adjustments and going where the market's need them. And I think that's such a powerful thing that we can show to our NC State students. It's something that I'd like to get our NC State alumni entrepreneurs involved with because I think they need those reminders as well. I could see NC State entrepreneurs having an entire wall representation at the next CES. That would be an amazing dream of mine.

Janet Kennedy (05:14):

So the program at NC State does involve mentorship, right?

Jennifer Capps (05:18):

Absolutely. In many different ways. NC State entrepreneurship offers a mentoring program where we bring people from the community in to interact very naturally with our students and we let the students and the mentors pair themselves off as they see fit.

Janet Kennedy (05:34):

One of the other things I found interesting at CES is the number of people who have come up who either are from North Carolina and they're so excited to see the state of North Carolina represented here or they recognize that we are a growing, expanding dynamic technology.

Jennifer Capps (05:52):

Absolutely. The NC State Alumni Association has done such a wonderful of creating an entrepreneurs affinity group within that association, so entrepreneurs can now get together, they can network, they can build relationships, find potential new clients, and let's not forget, NC State doesn't just produce entrepreneurs. We produce really great employees of startup companies so they can recruit for their first level employees as well.

Janet Kennedy (06:20):

You know, that's a really good point because if you have employees with an entrepreneurship mindset, they're going to be problem solvers. They're not going to expect you to hand over a fully written job description and it not change. They're probably going to push back a little bit and challenge the companies that they join to do better, to be better and to innovate.

Jennifer Capps (

CES 2020 Tom Miller, NCSU PT II

We continue our interview with Tom Miller, Senior Vice Provost at NC State University about entrepreneurship culture to innovate and programs fostering business-building environment at North Carolina State University.

EDPNC Colin Kiser

Joining me on the Trade Show Live podcast is Colin Kaiser from the EDPNC, which stands for the economic development partnership of North Carolina. Colin works in the international business development group, focusing on foreign direct investments coming from Europe and India. His role is helping North Carolina develop business partnerships around the globe. The EDPNC will be at CES 2020. 

Brilliant Sole Jeff Guard

Jeff Guard is the Founder and CEO of Brilliant Sole. They are returning to CES 2020 as part of the North Carolina Startup Pavilion at booth #52318.  Brilliant Sole is a smart footwear platform for VR with multiple applications from gaming to health care.