Financing the Dream: Never a Better Time

TIM ROWE,Founder and CEO, Cambridge Innovation Center

C ome to the WPI Venture Forum and learn how a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist has grown and sustained companies with various sources of financing. Tim Rowe will discuss the different roles and relationships among the various sources of growth capital: friends and family, individual angels and private investors, angel groups, and venture capitalists. Rowe will also discuss making the sales pitch to the financiers, closing the deal, and working together with investors.

Tim Rowe is the Founder and CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center (www.cictr.com), located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. CIC is the largest and fastest growing business incubator in the Boston area, housing approximately 100 startup companies. In addition, Rowe is a Venture Partner and member of the investment committee of the DFJ New England Fund, the New England arm of the $3 billion Draper Fisher Jurvetson network of funds. He serves on the boards of several private companies, including H3, an online referral-based professional recruiting company, Veritas Medicine, an online patient recruitment company, and Lumidigm, Inc., a biometric identity sensor technology company.

From 2001 to 2003, Rowe was appointed a Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of business strategy for technology companies. Earlier, while a student at MIT in 1994, he cocoordinated the first World Wide Web consortium in Geneva. Rowe has also served with the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Madrid, Tokyo, and Singapore, and with the Mitsubishi Research Institute in Tokyo. He holds an MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management and a BA from Amherst College.