#raidthefridge

May is on its way out: time for Fathers' Day and Back-to-School promos for B2C businesses; time to pitch to corporate for corporate business and budgets for B2B businesses; and time for Kickstart's #raidthefridge event for everyone!

We have an awesome line-up of speakers for the May session!

1) Dave Lim & Stefan Jacob: the two men tasked with the mission to launch Coca-Cola Founders - Coke's innovation platform - all across Asia.

2) Joe Ziegler: Entrepreneur-in-Residence in muru-D's Singapore Accelerator will talk about the accelerator's program and its expansion in Asia.

A bit of background on our speakers:

• Dave Lim considers himself a polymath, provocateur, pioneer and possibilist. Since 1996 he has worked on many sides of the entrepreneurial fence, as a venture capitalist and entrepreneur in the Pacific Rim and Silicon Valley, angel investor, marketer, educator, central banker and global fund manager. Dave was born in Singapore and has lived in Canada, Australia and the US. He studied at Stanford, Berkeley, University of New South Wales, and University of British Columbia. He loves to cook, travel to discover, has driven across two continents and once circumnavigated the world for six months by backpack. “If you think you're a leader and no one is following you, you're only taking a walk.”

• Stefan Jacob has a blended background as a strategy consultant, energy trader and social entrepreneur. Having worked on projects in Mexico, Ethiopia and throughout Asia, he is as comfortable in a boardroom as a village hut. Originally from Boston, he came to Singapore in 2010 to start a new social enterprise and then used his startup experience to build the Urban Prototyping platform with Newton Circus and support the crazy innovations it created. “Figure out where you want to go in life, make decisions based on how you want to get there and don’t worry if you end up somewhere different.”

• Joe Ziegler started his life and education in Texas but began his IT career in the Silicon Valley. In 1995 he worked at Netscape developing some of the first e-commerce applications during the early days of the Internet. His next venture took him to NetGravity and his second classic Internet IPO. After that, Joe enjoyed building several startups from the ground up in the role of the technical executive responsible for the company IP and managing engineering groups. His most recent thriving venture was Iris Data Services, which landed on the “Forbes 500 Fastest Growing Companies in the US” list, and was recently acquired by EPIQ Systems (NASDAQ: EPIQ), for $134M.
  In 2006, Joe began using cloud services and virtualisation to create the infrastructure for Iris Data Services as the Director of Technical Services. Later, he worked with several enterprises developed on the cloud, including building his own company, IndexMedia, that successfully exited in the Australian market. Today, he continues to work with startups providing technical expertise and angel investment support and acts as the muru-D Singapore Accelerator Entrepreneur in Residence.

• About Coca-Cola Founders

Coca-Cola Founders design and build innovative start-ups, leveraging on The Coca-Cola Company's ability to scale and our amazing assets together to unlock new ways to create value on a local and global basis. We've created and launched nine innovation outposts globally to build start-ups into scale-ups. First of all, we are in high-tech business and NOT in the business of beverages. Our mission is in new venture design, the art and science of building and launching new products and experiences, like any start-up. Second, like Google X, we design, launch and grow our OWN innovative product and business ventures. We do NOT invest in, accelerate or incubate other startups.

In 2015, we are expanding and seeking Market Entry and Business Launch Directors in ASEAN including in Manila, We are looking for seasoned and experienced start-up entrepreneurs, or professionals from the corporate world to join our team: People who are innovative business builders, who have "been there and done that", who have identified customer pains, designed, positioned, launched and marketed new products and businesses. We are focusing on easy to use yet powerful solutions for the traditional trade market, made up of distributors, wholesales and larger retailers. We are providing business management tools (software delivered over the internet via PC, tablets and smartphones) and marketplace solutions, to solve their daily business challenges. We are inspired to help the many hundreds of thousands of traditional trade business owners, from the largest to the smallest 'mom and pop' stores throughout developing markets to help them to run more successful businesses and improve their lives as business owners.

• About muru-D

muru-D is a startup accelerator program backed by Telstra.

muru-D Singapore is looking for the region’s best digital talent, to help to build the entrepreneurial ecosystem across Southeast Asia.
We aim to identify and recruit startups who will come to Singapore to grow their idea into a business. Selected startups will receive: seed capital; use of our purpose built premise in the heart of Singapore’s commercial heart; access to a network of world-class mentors, coaches and potential business partners.