From Farley Duval
To give you an overview of what White Bull is doing… we want to fill a gap that exists in the conference space in Europe. When I relaunched the Red Herring Europe conferences in Europe in 2005, there was a lack of support for early stage firms and the entrepreneurs pushing hard to build an ‘innovation ecosystem’ in Europe.
But over the past 5+ years, incredible support has appeared for seed/early stage firms; TechCrunch Europe, SeedCamp, gov’t and privately supported incubators, Plugg, LeWeb, to name a few. But most of the attention goes to the sexy, emerging firms. So what happens to these rising stars over the next years…especially the Growth-stage firms? We want to talk about how firms (from seed to growth-stage) should be positioning themselves from Day One until that potential liquidity event (IPO, trade sale, etc.).
White Bull will bring together 200+ of Europe’s «movers and shakers.» Serial entrepreneurs/innovators, investors (angel/VC/Private Equity), CorpDev/M&A from large public corps, financiers (bankers/M&A boutiques), and all the rest (legal/audit/exec search), they all have a part to play. We want to present an intimate, invitation-only atmosphere, where people can really network and discuss what is going on in Europe and how to succeed globally. Again, between the ‘mega’ events like Mobile World Congress and LeWeb, and the smaller local events, I think there is a need for a pan-European, high-level gathering of the industry’s best and brightest. Have a look at: http://www.whitebull.com
Thus far, the industry has been very supportive of what we are doing. The theme of ‘Exits’ is on everyone’s mind and the industry needs to solve liquidity issues for early stage firms. My Advisory Board (Sherry Coutu, Anil Hansjee of Google, Roberto Bonanzinga of Balderton, Yann de Vries of Cisco, Bernard Gander of Logitech, Manish Madhvani of GP Bullhound, Joerg Sievert of SAP Ventures, Ray Skoglund of McNamee Lawrence, Mark Veverka of Barrons, Falk Mueller-Veerse of Cartagena Capital, David Einstein of Forbes, Robin Wauters of TechCrunch, Christophe Maire of txtr, Stewart Townsend of Oracle/Sun Startup Essentials, and Peter Zaboji of INSEAD) has helped shape the speaker program and many of them will be speaking at the event. HotSheetJuly-3
Select attendees include:
360 Capital Amiando Astutia Ventures Atomico |
Balderton Capital |
Barrons Brown Rudnick Cisco |
Draper & Co. Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson |
ETV Capital Forbes |
Google Ventures |
GP Bullhound |
Hasso Plattner Ventures |
Hommels Holdings IBM Venture Group |
Index Ventures Intel Capital |
Jefferies & Co. |
Logitech |
McNamee Lawrence Microsoft |
Mooreland Partners |
Nokia |
Oracle Qualcomm Ventures Robert Bosch Venture Capital |
SAP Ventures |
SEB Ventures Spotify |
Straub Ventures Team Europe Ventures TechCrunch UBS |
Van den Ende & Dietmers |
Ventech Ventures |
Vivat Ventures |
Vodafone |
Woodside Capital |