Man, I’ve been busy lately balancing my duties at SkillSlate and my last semester of business school.  I haven’t had any free time to blog, but I did want to briefly post links to a couple cool video interviews that I’ve been a part of lately.   We were fortunate to have received some great coverage of SkillSlate via video interviews with both The Huffington Post and AOL Small Business.  Thanks to Ramon B. Nuez Jr., Zev Mo Green, and Lauren Drell for the coverage!

As I previously wrote, a couple months ago I participated in a great event at NYU Stern called the Entrepreneur’s Roundtable.  I had meant to write more about it a while back, but I just discovered a great summary by the school newspaper.

While I know many of the entrepreneurs at Stern, I met a few new folks who either have or are currently starting very impressive companies.  It was truly impressive to hear my peers’ stories.  While all impressive in their own ways, one that struck me was first year MBA Linz Shelton who once got the UCLA football team to help her assemble her Cuffz by Linz bags when she was out of money but had just secured a huge order from Nordstrom.  Other stories included a classmate who had just raised angel funding at a several million dollar valuation, to others who had bootstrapped their businesses to profitable and growing organizations.  I was honored to have taken part, and I’m equally honored to work beside such great people and entrepreneurs everyday at Stern.

It’s been a rough winter for this California boy. We got dumped on last night, but at least my street is pretty this morning.

I posted back in September about an IA Ventures VC internship opening, but wanted to re-post as they are actively hiring for an internship position once again.  They’re a solid firm that is extremely active in the New York VC/entrepreneurship community.  If I were in the market I would definitely apply.

You can find the full application here, but basic details are below.

IA Ventures (http://www.iaventures.com) is seeking a Venture Capital Intern to support the operations and investment processes of our fund.

We are an early-stage investment fund focused on companies that develop breakthrough tools and technologies for managing and extracting value from Big Data. We also work hard to promote NYC entrepreneurship through a number of efforts, including TechStars NY, SeedStart and the Columbia and NYU Venture Communities.

We’re looking for someone who loves venture to help us in a number of ways. The more ways you can help, the more valuable you’ll be here. You should be analytical, innovative and driven. You should also possess a good head for business, a keen attention to detail, and a profound distaste for business formal.

Responsibilities:
- Help diligence potential investments, including: financial modeling, market analysis, and primary and secondary research
- Help build investment presentations for our portfolio companies looking to raise their next round
- Provide operational support to our internal initiatives
- Maintain our internal investment database

Skill set:
- Meaningful understanding of and involvement in the startup ecosystem
- Entrepreneurial operating experience is a big plus, but not a requirement
- Tech savviness is definitely, definitely required
- Strong verbal and writing skills (Powerpoint too)
- Exceptional organizational skills and a strong attention to detail

Commitment:
- Flexible, but we need you in the office at least one day a week (we’re located in Flatiron)
- This internship is unpaid

The big Google finally just updated its public facing PageRank metric.  Despite PageRank not having the same level of importance that it used to in SEO, people in the industry still use it as a baseline gauge of a site’s link popularity and value.  Google hadn’t updated its public toolbar PageRank since April 2010, or just over 8 months.  Typically Google updates their public PageRank every quarter or so, which makes this most recent period the longest update drought that I’ve seen since I started studying SEO about sever years ago.  Regardless, I was very pleased to see that the sites that I work on saw nice public bumps in this latest page rank update.

Our friend Judi (@7huck) stopped by the SkillSlate office on Friday to ask Bartek and I about the site and how the company was formed.  You can view the video interview below, or at Shack Nation.

Thanks so much Judi for your time and for profiling us!

I just posted a guest blog post over at the GeekEstateBlog about how to leverage advanced Twitter search for hyper-local social media marketing.  I was admittedly a little late to the game in truly ‘getting’ the full power of Twitter.  I’m now a believer.

I feel very fortunate to have been invited to speak on an NYU Stern entrepreneurship panel this coming Monday.  Full event details can be found on the EEX website, but here’s the description from their site:

Seven of NYU Stern’s best entrepreneurs are currently launching companies while in Bschool and taking advantage of NYU resources to propel their businesses forward. The panelists will discuss their real-life experiences with entreprenuership at NYU and the challenges they have overcome with their successful startups, which encompass social media, video, fashion, ecommerce, social venture, and venture capital portfolio companies. You don’t want to miss this rare opportunity. Join us Monday, October 18, 4:30-6pm in room 3-110.

There is a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial activity taking place in the NYU ecosystem, and the Stern MBA program has actually exceeded my expectations in this department.  The Stern Entrepreneurs Exchange Club is now the largest student club, and is throwing a ton of exceptional events.  Great job and congrats go out to the club leaders!

I hope to see some of you on Monday.

Given how rare VC internship opportunities are, I wanted to share this venture capital internship opportunity with IA Ventures.  I had the opportunity to meet with Brad Gillespie while fundraising for SkillSlate.  While it was a pass for them, Brad was extremely insightful and gave us some great ideas and advice (some of which we are actually working to implement right now).  I’m sure they’d be great to work for, so good luck if you choose to apply!  Details are below.

Title: Venture Capital Intern

IA Ventures (http://www.iaventurepartners.com) – an early-stage venture capital firm investing in companies developing breakthrough tools and technologies for managing and extracting value from Big Data – is seeking a Venture Capital Intern to support the operations and investment processes of our fund. The successful candidate will become a contributing member of a small team of highly successful investors and entrepreneurs. The candidate will be a highly analytical, innovative and driven self-starter with good business judgment and a keen attention to detail.

Responsibilities:

- Help diligence potential investments, including: financial modeling, market analysis, and primary and secondary research

- Research areas of strategic importance to the IA Ventures ecosystem

- Provide operational support to IA Ventures’ internal initiatives

- Maintain IAVP’s internal investment database

Requirements:

- Meaningful understanding of and involvement in startup ecosystem

- Entrepreneurial operating experience a big plus

- Tech savvy / net-native

- Strong verbal and writing skills

- Exceptional organizational skills and a strong attention to detail

Commitment:

- Flexible, but minimum of 15 hours per week

- This internship is unpaid

Please send (i) resume + (ii) one-paragraph explanation of interest to jobs@iaventurepartners.com BY SEPTEMBER 15

Some big news today for the NYC tech community.  According to TechCrunch, Etsy recently raised $20M at a pre-money valuation of just under $300 million.  That’s a big number.  Other noteworthy stats from the article include that the company is profitable, on-track for $30-50M in revenue this year, and expects to do $400M in gross transactions this year and $1B next year.  In my opinion, from a valuation perspective at least, this places Etsy among the ‘elite’ private tech companies in the country.  It’s nice to see the newest addition to the ‘elite’ list coming from my new backyard (Brooklyn).

This is also good news for SkillSlate team member and former Etsy employee, Kelly, and her fiance Chris, who is an Etsy co-founder.  Despite this not being a liquidity event, it has to be nice to see the massive valuation jump.