Alex Benik (Battery Ventures)

Alex Benik is a Partner at Battery Ventures. The talk promises to be buzzword- and jargon-fueled romp through current topics in venture capital. Alex will review some of the basics of the venture-capital industry and cover a number of areas Battery is focused on in its practice investing across enterprise IT and developer tools/platforms. He will also provide some advice for technical founders looking to become entrepreneurs, and pass on some pearls of wisdom from CMU grads in the Battery portfolio who have done exactly that. Please come equipped with everything you always wanted to ask a VC but were afraid to ask.

Bio:
Alex Benik joined Battery in 2001 and currently works out of the firm’s Boston office. From 2001 through 2006, he was based in Menlo Park. Alex focuses on investments in infrastructure technologies for enterprises across the entire stack from hardware to developer tools/platforms. He is also one of the firm’s focal points for relationships with technologists and end users at Fortune 1000 companies and web-scale operators. During his tenure at Battery, Alex has been involved with investments including Anobit Technologies (acquired by Apple), MaxLinear (NYSE: MXL), Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), Optichron (acquired by Netlogic), Veraz Networks (NASDAQ: VRAZ), VSS Monitoring (acquired by Danaher), and ZeroG Wireless (acquired by Microchip). He is currently involved with Battery’s investments in Cask, Catchpoint, Cumulus Networks, Diablo Technologies, Fungible, GuardiCore, Primary Data, Stratoscale and Vivid Cortex. Alex was named one of the top cloud infrastructure investors by GigaOM. Prior to Battery, Alex was an analyst at The Yankee Group, where he conducted market research and consulted on data communications. While in this position, he executed strategic marketing and competitive analysis for clients including major networking equipment vendors and service providers. Alex earned a BA in government from Wesleyan University, which has not prevented him from impersonating an engineer in his professional life.

More Info: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/calendar/wed-2017-10-25-1630/scs-venture-capital-talk