The Growing Companies Lecture Series

The Growing Companies Lecture Series creates a forum where entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial managers engage on topics salient to bridging the gap from fleeting startup (~$10 million in revenue) to the successful, sustainable, mid-size and large companies of tomorrow (100 million and up). The forum is heavily biased towards content and highly interactive. The series goal is to provide thought provoking and practical advice that audience members can use to create better companies, and provide a forum where audience members can interact informally with speakers and each other.

This series is roughly quarterly, with each event focused on a different aspect of growing companies (e.g. war for talent and professionalizing management, designing your R&D process, and professionalizing the sales force). Typical events run for three hours, with food and registration from 6-7 followed by lecture and question and answer period from 7-9. Audiences have ranged in size from ~70 to ~100. For more information, to volunteer on the organizing team, or if you have future speaker ideas, please contact Rick Marshall (rmarshall@alum.mit.edu) or Jason Sharma (jsharma@alum.mit.edu).

To be notified of future events, subscribe to our mailing list at entbizmit-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Previous speakers include:

• Cindy McCaffrey (7/2003), Google Vice President, Corporate Marketing - Innovative Marketing - The Google Story
• Sam Maslak (2/2003), Founder and retired CEO of Acuson Corporation (now owned by Siemens) on starting and running a medical device company
• MikeRamsay (4/2003), founder, president, and CEO, TiVo, refocusing on profitable growth and an intellectual property driven businesses model
• Richard Wong (10/2001), Openwave, SVP of marketing and product management, on Strategic Marketing
• Ian Eslick(6/2001), Founder of Silicon Spice, Head of Software development for Broadcom Carrier Access Business Unit on redesigning product development as Silicon Spice's needs changed from new startup to $1.2 billion company
• Joe Galuszka (3/2001), Global Chief Morale Officer, Scient; growing and sustaining the people organization- from deciding upon culture and values to creating the recruiting, integration, and retention processes that sustained the organization in a market downturn
• Paul Rosenblum VP Product Marketing and Management, Blue Martini Software (10/2000); product management
• Dr. JoMei Chang (6/2000), President and CEO, Vitria; growth war stories
• Louis Borders (5/2000), founder, Web Van, Borders Books & Music; business development & partnerships
• Adam Grosser (1/2000), President, Subscriber Networks, Excite @ Home; growing companies, sales
• Mark Gainey (11/1999), president, founder, Kana Communications; growing companies, necessity of succession