Entrepreneurial Activism

The other week I went to the Finance4Founder’s event put on by the Master of 500 Hat’s Dave McClure, Flowtown’s Dan Martell, and Event organizer extraordinaire Cassie Phillips.

Their monthly dinner is an invite only event and here is some more info about the dinner on their website:

ABOUT

Finance4Founders is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, & investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of internet startups around issues of fund raising, option pools, and term sheets. We meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in raising capital, working with investors, and compensating great teams.

The co-founders of Finance4Founders are Dave McClure & Dan Martell; organizers also include Cassie Philips & countless others. Finance4Founders draws inspiration from (and plagiarizes liberally) Startup2Startup, Round Zero, Silicon Forum, and numerous other previous & future Silicon Valley geek and entrepreneurial events.

The primary goals of Finance4Founders are:

1. Learn about financing & startups
2. Celebrating success stories
3. Meet promising new geeks & entrepreneurs
4. Eat, drink, & have fun

This month’s dinner was called “Startup Hiring: I’ve hired all my friends – now what?”and featured both Peter Pham of Billshrink.com and Dan Arkind of Jobscore.com Here is a bit on their bio’s from the Finance4Founder’s website:

Peter Pham
As CEO of BillShrink, Peter drives company expansion and is an advocate for customer rights and transparency among service providers. He was previously vice president of business development at Photobucket.com, where he was the fifth employee and was responsible for driving user acquisition, strategic partnerships and corporate development. Photobucket was acquired in 2007 by Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corporation.

When Peter left in 2008, Photobucket had grown to more than 61M users, making it the #1 photo sharing site and the 38th most visited site in the U.S. Prior to Photobucket, Peter was in the enterprise space for more than 8 years working in sales, marketing, reseller channel development, product and strategy for multiple startups in the fields of mid-range server computing, software as a service, solid state storage and mobilization of enterprise software.
Peter holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and a minor in business management from the University of California, Irvine.

Dan Arkind
Dan is a 14 year veteran of the startup recruiting wars. He has filled every role at venture backed startups from employee 0 to 100, including connecting founders with one another. Dan is currently the CEO of JobScore, an online recruiting solution in use by 50+ Bay Area employers. In 2006 Dan co-founded STIRR, an entrepreneur networking group.

Here are the Dan Arkind’s slides from the event rightfully called “Hiring Hacks”, blog post about the event, and twitter account for Finance4Founders:

Slides from SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/danarkind/hiring-hacks-for-founders

Dan Arkind’s Blog post on JobScore about the event
http://blog.jobscore.com/hiring-hacks-for-founders

Also be sure to follow the Finance4Founders twitter account for event updates and great tid bits about financing and startup issues
http://twitter.com/Fin4Founders