Silicon Flatirons, ATLAS, and ITP present Alex White as our featured entrepreneur with moderators Brad Bernthal, Brad Feld and Jill Van Matre.
Alex White has been around music his whole life. His dad is a professional cellist and he grew up playing cello, guitar, piano, and bass fronting a band in high school and working at a local recording studio.
He then got much more into the business side of things working two summers at Universal Records, running the production company at Northwestern University (booking and producing acts like Counting Crows, Kanye West, Flight of the Conchords, Ok Go, Girl Talk etc.)
Next Big Sound went through Techstars in 2009 and raised a seed round that fall. The company has grown to 10 people, 2 global major label deals, and with two charts licensed to Billboard Magazine. In 2011 Next Big Sound was awarded most innovative B2B startup at Midem, hottest tech company at Canadian Music Week and finalist at the sxsw music accelerator. In 2010 Billboard named the company one of 10 Startups To Watch and Alex White to their 30 Under 30 list. In 2011 Alex and his co-founders David Hoffman and Samir Rayani were named to Bloomberg Businessweek’s 25 under 25 and Alex was named to Fortune’s 30 under 30 music list.
In January of 2012 Next Big Sound announced a $6.5m Series A fundraiser from IA Ventures, Foundry Group. The syndicate also included Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC angels like TechStars’ David Cohen, IntelliQuest’s Peter Zandan, Compete.com founder David Cancel and Northwestern Entrepreneurship Professor Troy Henikoff.
Entrepreneurs Unplugged is a meeting place where faculty, students and community members with technical backgrounds learn about and get involved in entrepreneurship. In particular, the program offers students and faculty an opportunity to learn how a successful start up is created as well as an opportunity to network. Each Entrepreneurs Unplugged meeting features food, drink and – most importantly – an experienced entrepreneur to discuss his/her start-up experiences.