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TiE-Boston Celebrates A Year Of Changes And Gives Awards To Members At Annual TiE Gala

Press Release
11/21/2012

TiE-Boston held its Annual Gala Dinner on November 8th at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA. Over 100 people including Charter members and Sponsors attended to celebrate another year of successful TiE-Boston activities. The evening’s agenda included an Investor Game, stimulating talks, and an Awards ceremony that honored the accomplishments of Charter Members, who have built great companies and created immense value for the community. It was a moment to thank all the sponsors, supporters, and volunteers of TiE-Boston for another successful year of fostering entrepreneurship.

Prat Moghe, TiE-Boston’s President, kicked off the evening program with a welcome address. As his first Gala, after taking over as president in January, Prat summarized the exciting developments at TiE-Boston this past year. This included moving the TiE office to Cambridge, launching the TiE Challenge Accelerator Program: to help first-time entrepreneurs turn ideas into real companies, and hosting a great TiECON East. He also talked about the excitement TiE-Boston continues to generate by the increased involvement in the entrepreneurial energy of Kendall Square in Cambridge. To further that work, TiE Circle was introduced by Saluni Fadia, President & CEO of Abacus Software, which is a new mode for Charter Members to give back to the organization.

Next, Rob Soni, Investor and former General Partner at Matrix Partners, took a few minutes to share his thoughts about the “Lost Decade 2002-20012.” Rob explained how once-in-a-lifetime events (i.e. market collapses, natural disasters, epidemics, etc) are becoming more common and transforming business beliefs. He discussed how and why entrepreneurs should change the way they think and do business. Some of Rob’s examples included being wary of terms when taking on debt, focusing on predictability rather than growth, watching not just the equity markets but also the debt markets, choosing offshoring for reasons other than cost, and defining success with a single focus rather than “multi-acts.”

The second speaker was Hitendra Patel, Managing Director of the IXL Center at the Hult International Business School. He talked about how Hult is joining forces with the Clinton Global Initiative to host the President’s Challenge, the largest global business plan competition for NGOs. This competition each year focuses on a major social issue. Next year, 6 teams with solutions for hunger will come to NYC to pitch for $1M in prizes and be part of an accelerator program hosted in Boston.

Evan Dangel from Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and Thierry Weissenburger from the Canadian Consulate (both representing TiE Boston sponsor companies) helped announce the award winners to a room filled with suspenseful excitement and unexpected amazement.

The Crystal Award for a Charter Member who built his company from the ground up was given to Ramesh Kapur, President and CEO of Med Tech Gases, the “Best Regional Mid-Sized company” supplying compressed gases.  It is also the oldest commercial gas supplier in the New England area serving Research Centers, Pharmaceutical & Biotech companies, Hospitals, Universities, and others for the last four decades.

Awards for 'Entrepreneurial Achievement' for successful exits went to: Gaugarin Oliver, founder of RedEgg Solutions, a leading provider of media intelligence and analysis that was acquired by Thomson Reuters late last year. Puneesh Chaudhry and Sanjay Jain, co-founders of Copiun, an innovator in secure mobile collaboration which allows users to directly and securely access all files from anywhere, also received awards. Copiun was successfully acquired by Good Technology in September.

Amrith Kumar of ParElastics, an elastic database virtualization for the cloud, and Asa Kalavade of Zettics (formerly Umber Systems), which provides big data analytics solutions to carriers that deliver immediate, actionable insights on data activities,  won the award for successfully closing a round of funding for their respective ventures.

Awards were also given for successfully running TiE Boston Programs to Ramji Raghavan for his contribution to the TiE Challenge program. Richard Kimball of Edwards Wildman and Mick Bain of WilmerHale were recognized for being Outstanding Partners to TiE-Boston Programs for their help with running the Bootcamp at TiECON East, workshops for entrepreneurs and assisting in the TiE Challenge program this year.

The program also included the TiE Challenge Innovation Showcase where attendees played an Investor Game as they interacted with the companies involved with TiE-Boston. Each attendee received $300K to “invest” in participating companies. The money thus “invested” was counted to determine the top 3 companies that were most popular. Anupendra Sharma, Partner at Siemens Venture Capital, announced the winners of the TiE Investor Game, which were Mobee, Cellanyx Diagnostics, and Architexta with $3.5M, $1.5M, and $1.2M investments respectively.

Congratulations to all the winners! TiE-Boston would like to thank its Sponsors, Charter members, Program chairs, and volunteers for supporting the entrepreneurial community in the New England area through their continuous participation and help in organizing our diverse programs.



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