The 9th Founder Showcase is scheduled for January 19th at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, and for the first time will feature TheFunded.com’s Entrepreneur Investor Awards, where we will celebrate the best investors of 2011. All in all, this will be our most exclusive event yet – with just 175 tickets available to the general public.
Applications to the FREE Pitch Competition are open until December 31st, 2011, at http://foundershowcase.com/apply. Over $30mm has been raised by previous presenters, so apply now and start collecting votes.
These Investor Awards are not your average popularity contest. In fact, the main criteria are the 2011 ratings and reviews investors receive from the 17,000+ Founder and CEO members of TheFunded.com – the web’s largest community to rate and review startup investors. You could call it the “People’s Choice” awards – but we prefer to call it an “Entrepreneur Investor Awards.”
The awards up for grabs are;
- Most Disruptive Investor: Reserved for an investor who consistently demonstrated an investment strategy in 2011 of supporting innovative companies with big aspirations to disrupt established markets.
- Top Rated Investor in the Americas: Reserved for an investor who demonstrated an impressive track record in 2011, and received the highest acclaim from TheFunded.com’s members in 2011 across North, Central, and South America.
- Top Rated Investor in Asia: Reserved for an investor who demonstrated an impressive track record in 2011, and received the highest acclaim from TheFunded.com’s members in 2011 across Asia.
- Top Rated Investor in Europe, Middle East and Africa: Reserved for an investor who demonstrated an impressive track record in 2011, and received the highest acclaim from TheFunded.com’s members in 2011 across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
- Best New Fund Manager: Reserved for a new investor in 2011 that received the highest acclaim from the TheFunded.com’s members, and who has immediately demonstrated savvy and a willingness to help promising entrepreneurs succeed.
We’ll be announcing the finalists shortly, so stay tuned.
Second, as part of the awards, we will have on-stage, interactive discussions with three of the top investors of 2011. These discussions will leverage input from attendees, and address critical new trends in startups and investing for 2012. So far we’ve confirmed Mike Maples, Jr., Managing Partner of FLOODGATE and early investor in Twitter, Digg, Chegg, and ng:moco, as our first speaker. The other two will be announced shortly.
Finally, the stakes for both our Pitch Competition and Demo Table Competition have been raised as well. Only 8 companies will compete in this Pitch Competition (versus the usual ten). And, there will now be three winners to the Demo Table Competition, who will each get to speed-pitch one of the Keynote speakers on stage in front of the audience. Get your Demo Table today at http://foundershowcase.com/tables.