C2SV 2013 Holds VC Pitch Competition for Start-Ups

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Sept. 5, 2013 - PRLog -- San Jose, Calif., Sept. 4, 2013 –  Creative Convergence Silicon Valley 2013 (C2SV 2013) (http://c2sv.com/) has announced a VC Pitch Competition in which entrepreneurs will compete for an opportunity to pitch their ideas in front of a panel of leading Silicon Valley investors.

The panel is led by Dafina Toncheva, a partner at U.S. Venture Partners. Other judges include longtime Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Nat Goldhaber of Claremont Creek Ventures and Zaw Thet, a partner in Signia Venture Partners.

Startup companies may enter the competition by going to Conferences > Startups tab of the C2SV.com website and completing a short entry form.

Selected companies will present at the C2SV conference at 10am on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2013 in San Jose, Calif.

To enter, a company must be six months old or younger and still majority owned by its founders. The product or service must still be in development, and funding requirements must be less than $3 million. The winning company will receive a startup package of legal, financial and consulting services.

The C2SV Technology Conference is an independently-produced, three-day event that will be held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center from Thursday, September 26 to Saturday September 28. It will open with a keynote by Internet personality Robert Scoble and include appearances by video game inventor Nolan Bushnell, social media expert Brian Solis, Yahoo! chair Maynard Webb, brain scientist and author Jeff Stibel and Iggy and the Stooges guitarist James Williamson.

More than 50 sessions will cover such subjects as math-based currencies, social transportation and the sharing economy, open source standards, organizational reinvention, business disruption, cloud computing, convergence, digital content creation, apps development and more.

The full conference schedule can be found at c2sv.com/schedule/conference/

Panel of Judges

Nat Goldhaber

Nat Goldhaber is a managing director and co-founder of Claremont Creek Ventures. He is Claremont's resident expert on energy conservation and management systems. His focus in these investment areas is built on twenty years of experience in IT as: CEO of Cybergold, founder of Centram Systems West, founding CEO of Kaleida Labs and Vice President of Sun Microsystems. Prior to his business career, Nat served as Special Assistant to Pennsylvania’s Lt. Governor, William Scranton, III. He ran the state’s Energy Agency as its Interim Director. Some past investments include: Ask Jeeves, Shiva and Macromedia.Nat holds a Master’s degree in Education and is an emeritus member of the Executive Board of the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley. He serves as a member of the US Secret Service Electronics Crime Taskforce and is an Emeritus Board Member and Advisor to the Federation of American Scientists.

Zaw Thet

Zaw Thet is a veteran entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of search, social networking, mobile and advertising since the age of 19.  In 2011, Zaw was selected as one of ten entrepreneurs to serve on the United Nations Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council. Currently, Zaw is incubating two stealth projects as a co-founder and chairman of the board - plyfe.me and haulerdeals.com -  that cross between the mobile, social, gamification, loyalty, ecommerce, video and advertising sectors. Most recently the Founder and CEO of 4INFO, which he founded 2004, the AdHaven division of 4INFO has become the largest mobile advertising platform in the US under his leadership. Among his many accolades, Zaw was selected as one of BusinessWeek’s “Mobile Barons.”

Dafina Toncheva

Dafina Toncheva is a partner at U.S. Venture Partners. From 2010 to 2012, Dafina worked Tugboat Ventures, where she was a principal investor. Prior to Tugboat, she spent two years at Venrock, where she helped expand the firm’s investments in SaaS, virtualization, security, infrastructure and enterprise applications. Her investments include enterprise software makers Cloudflare and Aria Systems.. Before becoming a venture capitalist, Dafina held positions in development and product management at Microsoft, where she focused on authentication systems, digital signatures and business workflow. She earned a M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.S. in Computer Science, magna cum laude, with special focus on cryptography, efficient algorithms and database systems from Harvard University.

About C2SV

The C2SV technology conference takes place at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center from Thursday, Sept. 26 to Saturday, Sept. 28. The music begins Thursday night and goes through the closing party on Sunday. Tickets may be purchased at C2SV.com/tickets. For sponsorship inquiries, please email sponsors@c2sv.com.

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