On November 12, 2021, Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures joined Dr. Sunny Zhang, General Partner of Born Global Ventures at a virtual event to talk about Starting Companies as Immigrant Founders. Starting a company is hard. Starting a company as an immigrant is even harder. Nitin addressed the challenges and opportunities for immigrant founders in the US. 

Nitin is a founding partner of Unshackled Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm that focuses on investing and supporting immigrant entrepreneurs. Unshackled Ventures does more than just provide capital to fund the most ambitious founders; they designed their solution to provide immigration support and services at no cost to founders, to help optimize a founder’s time in building the future. This formula has sustained a portfolio of 60+ companies in a diverse range of industries. Before Unshackled, Nitin ran finance and strategy for edtech startup Kno (acquired by Intel in 2013) that raised over $90M of funding from some of the top VCs including a16z, First Round Capital, and Floodgate. Before Kno, Nitin immigrated from India to work at Deloitte where he focused on helping tech startups with growth, exits, and strategic initiatives. Nitin Pachisia has sat in several seats in the venture ecosystem and those experiences pushed him to create the same if not better access for others.

Many thanks to our event partners, business angel Minority association – baMa, First Bight Ventures, Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce, Impact Hub Houston, Indonesian American Chamber of Commerce Southeastern Central USA, ITA Houston Italian Trade Agency, Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs, Texas West Africa Chamber of Commerce (TWACC), Women in AI USA and Born Global Global for their kind support. 

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On October 20, 2021, marketing professor Dr. Krishnan Trichy joined Born Global Ventures General Partner Dr. Sunny Zhang for a virtual event to address How do the Sales of a New Product Grow. The key takeaway from his talk was that it is critical to identify the innovators and early adopters of your new product. They will become your spokesperson and help you penetrate the mass market and address the “side effects” through word of mouth.

Dr. Trichy V. Krishnan spends his professional time on academic research, teaching and consulting. Currently, he is a Professor at Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai and has held faculty positions in various institutions over the years like Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Rice University, USA, and NUS Business School, Singapore. At NUS, he also held administrative positions such as the Head of Marketing and Vice-Dean of Research & PhD. He has written many articles that have appeared in top academic journals, has got the Best MBA Teacher’s award at NUS, and has taught in many corporate executive programs covering several aspects of marketing including Marketing Strategy, Channel Strategies, Retailing Strategies, Pricing Strategies and New Product Management. His works on new product diffusion have got a lot of citations (counting 1500+), have been reprinted in many textbooks and are extensively used in the investment world. He has written award-winning case studies and was involved in consulting work for quite a few companies in the US (oil and gas industry) and Singapore for the past 20 years. He is also a board member of CIGS, a fin-tech company based in Chennai, India, that is building a digital bridge between people in rural markets and urban markets. 

Read more about Dr. Trichy’s talk at: https://lnkd.in/giMuYhSc

Many thanks to event partners, Elementz Ventures, Houston Community College, Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs, TiE Houston, Women in AI and Born Global Global for their kind support.

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On October 8, 2021, Allison Byers, Founder and CEO of Scroobious, joined General Partner of Born Global Ventures, Dr. Sunny Zhang for a virtual fireside chat. Allison addressed the fundraising strategies for underestimated founders. The discussion covered many important aspects of finance strategies such as:

Allison is an MBA with 15+ years of experience building and leading data-driven start-ups. She has done everything from management consulting to advising Google on marketing and strategy, to co-running a medical device company where she raised nearly $10M. Her model for building a clear and concise investor-ready pitch deck has been published in Business Insider and she is a frequent pitching advisor, mentor, and speaker. Her company, Scroobious is increasing diversity in the startup ecosystem by providing the education, tools, and community that founders need to create investor-ready pitch material, and a platform to help investors easily find those founders. 

We thank our event partners, Women in AI USA, Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce and Born Global Global for their kind support. 

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On September 24, 2021, General Partner of Born Global Ventures, Dr. Sunny Zhang was joined by Rebecca Springer, PhD and Hilary Wiek, members of the PitchBook institutional research team, for a virtual event. Rebecca and Hilary delivered their invaluable insights for Emerging, Diverse and Impact Managers, and the key topics discussed were:

Dr. Rebecca Springer is a Private Equity Analyst at PitchBook. She leads the team’s healthcare coverage and contributes to PitchBook’s quarterly PE and M&A market updates. Rebecca’s insights have been cited in publications including Institutional Investor and Buyouts, and she has published several peer-reviewed academic papers. She has earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a master’s from the University of Cambridge, and a doctorate from the University of Oxford.

Hilary Wiek, CFA, CAIA is the Lead Analyst for Fund Strategies and Performance at PitchBook. She also heads up PitchBook’s coverage of the ESG/Impact Investing space. With over 20 years of experience in asset owner, manager and advisory roles, Hilary was previously the Director of Investments at Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundations, where she handled portfolio management, impact/ESG, investment diligence and monitoring, and investment operations.

A massive thank you to our Event Partners, PitchBook Data, business angel Minority association – baMa, First Bight Ventures, Global Energy Mentors (GEM), Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs, Sutton Capital, The Cannon Community, Women in AI USA and Born Global Global for their unconditional support. 

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