Trade Show Live! On the Road The Trade Show Manager

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 th

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 w

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.

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. 

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.

Joining me on the podcast is Jeff Cameron. He's a partner in and also handles the business development for Logistimatics. Logistimatics sells GPS tracking devices and services for individuals and for businesses. They provide real-time GPS tracking for vehicles, fleets, assets and people.