NEXT VENTURE PITCH 2018

Selling out for the second year in a row, our 2018 conference brought together 250 attendees for an afternoon packed with the best content for entrepreneurs. The third-annual event featuring keynote speaker Mark Templeton, CEO of DigitalOcean, panels of advice from successful founders, venture capitalists, and more. The pitch competition featured 8 startup companies, all located in the Southeast. In 2018, the conference saw the addition of educational entrepreneur workshops in the morning, featuring lessons for CEOs on growing their revenue and data-driven marketing.

Check out the video below for highlights from 2018:

FEATURING

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Mark Templeton is the current CEO of DigitalOcean, a leading cloud computing platform serving over 3.5M developers and development teams. Before joining DigitalOcean, Mark was president and CEO of Citrix for over 20 years. Under his leadership, Citrix transformed from a $15 million organization with one product, one customer segment and one go-to-market path, to a global, diversified leader in software, with annual revenues of $3 billion and over 100 million users worldwide.

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Michael Cristinziano is an independent board member and advisor to growth stage software companies.  Previously, Michael was Corporate VP, Strategic Development at Citrix Systems, where he was responsible for merger and acquisition (M&A) strategy and execution, technology licensing, corporate venture capital investments and investor relations.

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Mark and Michael will share lessons learned during the rapid growth stage at Citrix and share anecdotes and insights regarding corporate culture, acquiring startups, corporate VC and partnering with industry leaders.

WORKSHOP LEADERS 

Dan Waldschmidt

Business Strategist at the EDGY Empire

How to Do More Revenue Next Month Than You Did All of Last Year

If you listen to the advice of most sales experts, you'll find yourself barely limping along in business -- feeling stuck and frustrated, with wild swings in your sales success. That because most experts are stupid and their strategies suck. Kidding. The experts aren't stupid. But they are wrong. And it's you who ends feeling helpless because you don't know what to do. Let me share with you a sales strategy that has created $17 billion in brand new revenue for my clients over the last few years. It's less selling. And more awesome. We call it the "Theater of Success". It's a new process for generating revenue that hacks the traditional rules and leverages the way ordinary people behave to produce results that are 1000% better -- at least! Come find out how.

Eric Dodds

Partner at Yield

How Any Company Can Navigate the World of Data-Driven Marketing to Scale Their Business

Today’s world of digital marketing and attribution is a wild west of data, digital skills and software—and there’s not a good place to learn it. Marketing software is either outdated, missing key features or too expensive for small-to-midsize companies, even if they are growing quickly. In this session, Eric Dodds, former CMO of the largest code school in the world, will separate marketing myth from reality and show you the fundamentals of how to build a scalable, data-driven marketing engine to grow your business. 

2018 PITCH COMPANIES

SENTIO

Charleston, SC

Integrated Biometrics

Spartanburg, SC

Modjoul

Clemson, SC

Accessible Diagnostics

Greenville, SC

Resiliency Technology

Spartanburg, SC

Van Robotics

Columbia, SC

Treis Blockchain

Greer, SC

6AM City

Greenville, SC