Topic: Start-up Secrets: What to Share & When (to validate your concept, understand the marketplace, put relationships in place).

To sign up please visit http://foundersspacesvapr2011.eventbrite.com/

Presenters:  Rama Sekhar of Norwest Venture Partners, Bilal Ahmed of @mytweetmark and @homecookme, and Lowell Ness and Joseph Perkins of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.

Lowell Ness

Lowell Ness

Lowell Ness is a partner and a founding member of Orrick’s Emerging Companies Group in the Silicon Valley Office. He has considerable experience in securities law and corporate governance matters. His practice focuses on high growth emerging companies and involves venture capital financings, mergers and acquisitions, public offerings and private placements. His clients include startup companies from the earliest stage and well established public companies. Mr. Ness also represents both private equity and venture capital funds.

Joseph Perkins, a corporate associate in Orrick’s Silicon Valley office, is a member of the Emerging Companies Group, which advises emerging companies and venture capital firms.  Mr. Perkins’s practice focuses on providing private venture financing and merger and acquisition services to Internet, high tech, and clean technology companies.

Rama Sekhar of Norwest Venture Partners focuses on early to late stage venture investments across a wide range of sectors at NVP. Before joining NVP in 2009, Rama was an Associate at Comcast Interactive Capital where he conducted due diligence on early and growth stage investment opportunities in the Digital Media, Internet, and Communications Infrastructure sectors.  Prior to Comcast Interactive Capital, Rama was a Product Manager at Cisco Systems, where he defined product strategy and roadmaps for $1B revenue products including the GSR 12000 Series and CRS-1 routers. Rama’s clients included international telecom and cable service providers including Verizon Business, British Telecom, and several providers in the Indian telecommunications market. Previously, Rama was a Sales Engineer at Cisco Systems supporting AT&T, where he sold the core and edge networking equipment that comprises AT&T’s national IP backbone.

Bilal Ahmed is the Founder of @mytweetmark and @homecookme.  He started his career at Novell in 1996 right at the beginning of the internet bubble, developing Novell’s web server.  He then moved to Formtek, a Lockheed Martin company which developed document management and work-flow solutions.  Bilal lead middle-ware development for Formtek’s backend systems.  Bilal moved to Actuate, helping customer build enterprise reporting solutions.  In 2005, Bilal started at hi5 as a very early engineer at the beginning of social networks bubble and built user facing features like photos, music, videos, mobile, friend multimedia cache system, viral and lead teams.  He then moved on to work for bebo.com developing features while focusing on key viral, retention and engagement metrics. He is now the founder of two websites, mytweetmark.com and homecook.me.

Feel free to bring up issues beyond this topic—we’re here to share and help!  Invite founders you know to join us.