Quotidian Ventures

It’s been a while since we’ve highlighted some of the awesome stuff we are up to at Quotidian! 

This week, we are getting ready and resting up for StartupBus to SXSW! We are thrilled to be supporting this year’s pilgrimage to Austin as a Northeast Regional Sponsor. 

StartupBus is a 72-hour hackathon on wheels, where 30 strangers conceive, build, and launch startups while taking an epic road trip to South By Southwest where they compete with teams from 6 other regions including Chicago, SF, Mexico, Tampa, plus an alumni bus from NYC. We’ll be updating you from the road- so keep an eye out! 

We hope you’ll meet us in SXSW for our panel, Building Successful Teams in Latin America featuring our friends:

• Sebastián Valin, ComparaOnline 
• Diego Saez-Gil,  WeHostels
• Bedy Yang, 500Startups 
• Pedro Torres Picón, Quotidian Ventures (Moderator)

We’re also sponsoring HackColumbia, a student hackathon at Columbia University this Friday and Saturday. We are thrilled that Seth Bannon, founder of Amicus will be representing QV as a judge at the demo’s on Saturday, and Amicus’ designer, Adrian Del Balso will be mentoring and teaching a workshop, “Make Your Apps Pretty and Functional” on Friday evening!

If you’re interested in mentoring or demo-ing an API- let us know and we’ll help make it happen! 

Follow us @qventures to keep up with the latest on #StartupBus #LatAmTeams and HackColumbia! 

zerply:

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with hackdesign to bring you courses from great designers to help you learn the basics of good design. Geared towards hackers but open to everyone, you’ll receive a design lesson in your inbox each week.

It’s free, simple and educational and it’s also built to help you work on real projects.

To learn more and to sign up go to hackdesign.org

Looking forward to seeing all the amazing designing that will take place.

Cheers
The Zerply Team

This celebrity post comes to us from Conrad Wadowski, a partner at GrowHack, who has launched products in multiple industries. Previously in economic consulting, Conrad co-founded and is the lead organizer at the Enterprise Tech Meetup in New York City.

There has been an overflow of interest in the startup community on a subject called “growth hacking,” but what exactly is it? 

To better understand growth hacking, let’s first start with the word “hacker”. A hacker is someone who is more concerned with achieving an objective, rather than following a prescribed process. While originally this definition was more associated with say, getting unauthorized access to a computer system, recently the word’s taken on a more positive connotation. At a startup, it means hacking together a product just good enough to take on customers. 

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fieldlens:

By Matt Sena, FieldLens CFO

FieldLens is making a major media announcement today - we have successfully secured seed financing and we could not be happier with the stellar group of investors that are helping us bring real change to field management in the construction industry. We’ll be posting the official press release this afternoon, so please check back for more information about who our investors are and how much we raised.

While we are so incredibly happy to finally be at the point where we can make this announcement, we also couldn’t be happier about hanging up our fundraising shoes for a while. Fundraising is hard. It’s mentally, emotionally and even physically challenging. And most importantly it takes time - a LOT of time.

Below are some thoughts on what we’ve learned in our journey to raise money, and some advice for anyone hoping to do the same.

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We have joined the masses on one of our favorite apps! Like us on Foursquare to follow us as we scope out the best of New York tech.

Check out our lists of Quotidian portfolio company headquarters, co-working spaces in NYC, and our favorite hangouts and out of office meeting locations around our neighborhood! 

See you out and about! 

We are thrilled to announce that Quotidian Ventures is a proud sponsor of New York City Startup Weekend on Sept 21-23rd! 

Startup Weekend is a non-profit global grassroots initiative that has hosted over 400 events in 100 countries around the world. The event begins where attendees pitch their business ideas and receive feedback from their peers. By popular vote, the best ideas are selected and teams are formed organically. The teams spend the next 54 hours creating a business model, coding, designing, and validating their market. Teams then present their prototypes and receive feedback from a panel of experts.  

These events are a great way to meet other entrepreneurs, potential co-founders, and immerse yourself in the LeanStartup Methodology. About 36% of companies launched at Startup Weekend are still going after 3 months. One of our portfolio companies, WeHostels (formerly inBed.me) was launched at the June 2011 NYC Startup Weekend! 

As a Gold Sponsor, we are offering to sponsor 10 Latin American entrepreneurs, designers, and hackers who would like to attend the event in NYC. If interested, please complete the form after the jump telling us a bit about yourself! Selected participants will also be invited to a VIP dinner with Quotidian’s Managing Partner, Pedro Torres Picón. 

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