Seed investor aiming to introduce portfolio companies to the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
Valley-Connect
Valley Connect is a unique program combining the elements of seed financing, and business development tailored to meet the specific needs of young entrepreneurs located in Central Europe. The program was inspired by Silicon Valley examples such as start up incubators, accelerators and search funds. One of the best kept secrets that in the past years Hungary had a great track record
producing outstanding start ups such as: prezi.com; ustream.com; logmein,com; web.analytics.yahoo.com Each of these companies kept their development capability in Hungary leveraging on the outstanding local talent at affordable cost and moved their sales and marketing operation to Silicon Valley to conquer the global marketplace. The program is backed by local entrepreneurs, who strongly believe in the existence of local talents with disrupting ideas. Our aim is to introduce them to the ecosystem in Silicon Valley and to stimulate the information flow between the Valley and Central Europe. The Budapest office was launched in early May and the Silicon Valley office will open in Palo Alto right on the Stanford campus from mid June until late August. The program
Our Pilot program was launched in March 2011 and after an extensive search process three start up was selected, where we also acquired minority interest. The first phase of the program will finish in June when the Beta products will be ready to be shown to investors. During the summer we will carry out a road show to meet investors in Silicon Valley and Central Europe. Nevertheless we are also representing non portfolio companies, which are looking for second round financing from Silicon Valley investors with specific domain knowledge. Based on our experiences during the pilot phase we aim to launch a program in late fall which will be backed by local and silicon valley investors and will aim to work with 20-30 start ups during the next two years. Team
Zsolt Weiszbart – extensive business development and operational experience
Zsolt is a recent graduate of Stanford University Graduate School of Business with more than 10 years experience in the IT sector. He was running the Hungarian office for a top multinational ERP company and as a member of the regional management team also gained experience working on different regional projects. Csaba Miskolczy – 15 years of experience in internet ventures
Csaba Miskolczy is the CEO and founder of Blogter LLC(2005) which operates several eastern european market-leading websites. Among these are the second largest Hungarian blog service, Blogter.hu, and the first Hungarian video sharing site IndaVideo.hu. He also founded the Hungarian Underground Startup conference (2008- ), and member of the editorial board of the Hungarian TED Youth conference (2010- ).
