SVOD – Silicon Valley Open Doors

Impact Through High-Tech Entrepreneurship

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Speakers

Farooq Abbasi

Farooq Abbasi

Farooq Abbasi

Principal at Costanoa Ventures

Farooq is a Principal at Costanoa Ventures, where he invests out of a third $175m fund and is thematically focus on AI / enterprise data, digital health and financial technology. Farooq began his investment career in 2011 has since been a venture and growth investor on the West Coast and most recently investing in Europe at Mosaic Ventures over the past 3 years.

Some of Farooq’s investments include Auto1 (Softbank), Remitly (Naspers), Zingbox, Redlock.io, and SimpleHealth.

In addition to helping entrepreneurs, he is also passionate about improving the gender ratio as well as cognitive / experiential diversity within technology and advises several non-profits focused on addressing these shortcomings.

Testimonials

The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries. I felt very comfortable at SVOD and recognized its participants as having the same type of DNA that made Silicon Valley what it is today.

Ron Conway

SV Angel

Cleary one of the very best conferences we attended and sponsored in Silicon Valley this year. To us the conference truly captured what we see in our daily practice, the substantial opportunities and also the challenges with cross-border business arrangements. We made many new meaningful connections.

Lars Johansson

Partner, K&L Gates

This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded keynote speakers’ line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur.

Richard Guha

President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

Great conference, interesting presentations and most important, relevant participants with concrete ideas and tremendous willingness to mentor and help startups.

Adi Bittan

Founder & CEO, OwnerListens & Stanford MBA

I am delighted to participate in and sponsor SVOD. It is particularly gratifying at this stage of my professional career to be able to support this unique organization and give back to the high-tech community. Looking back, I regret not having the benefits of SVOD network early on, when I really needed it! It is wonderful to see the new startups taking advantage of this very special forum.

Mike Sandler

CEO of Epiphan

The founders of the conference are very authentic and these are people that want to change the world and make things better for entrepreneurs and help people and I think that’s a great thing.

George Zachary

Partner, Charles River Ventures, (Midas List, 1st investor in twitter & Yammer, $1.4B under management)

The SVOD conference was a wonderful event. Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience.

Esther Dyson

Founder, EDventure Holdings

It’s a great conference and it brings together great content from really terrific speakers like we just had and then a network of really interesting entrepreneurs.

Andy Tsao

Managing Director, Silicon Valley Bank