If you’re from the Boston/Cambridge area and in the innovation community, it’s very likely that you’ve found yourself at Venture Café Kendall recently, hosted every Thursday at CIC Cambridge. These events are inarguably the preeminent networking gathering in the area. As a matter of fact, several hundred people attend each week.
We’re going to highlight one of Venture Café Kendall’s rarer events, Mini-Conferences.
The most recent one was hosted in August, centering around financial technologies and coinciding with FinTech Connect 2017 which “seeks to bring together the brightest minds who are building, funding, and innovating in the Greater Boston area’s FinTech Community.”
Mini-Conferences still offer the ample opportunity to make connections and check out what’s new in the innovation scene, but feature additional programming such as Flash Talks, which are 30-minute in-depth conversations about particular subfields. FinTech Connect 2017 had Flash Talks which were very wide in scope. One, for example, talked about how robo-advisors are disrupting the everyday of Wall Street, while another enabled its audience to understand personal data as its own asset that could be bought and sold. Moreover, all of the night’s events culminated in an entrepreneurs’ panel (including some CICers) of whom had already navigated the choppy waters of creating a FinTech startup.
Brian Axline, founder and CEO of Lucro (second from left) demos the product to FinTech Connect attendees.
One CIC member, Lucro, had a booth at Venture Café that evening. We chatted with them to learn more about their FinTech start up and reflections on their experience at the Thursday Gathering. Lucro’s platform enables “real estate investors and professionals [to] securely create and share institutional-grade financial models in minutes [by consolidating] all deal functions into a single, industry-standard platform, ensuring consistency across organizations and the industry in general.” That’s a lot! But imagine, if you will, a platform that brings together every possible piece of financial information for any given property! Lucro came to CIC Cambridge for the sake of practicality and their ability to scale and grow with us. They have also found that the benefits of being at CIC are pretty great (e.g. getting to be in featured in blog posts).
The team at Lucro said this was the biggest event they’d seen at Venture Café Kendall! They reveled in the opportunity to “speak with a number of VCs and get valuable feedback. [They] talked with a company (RateGravity) that offers a complementary service who is also in the real-estate space, and traded tech thoughts.” Interestingly enough, RateGravity also has a CIC connection as they were a TechStars company when the accelerator was housed at CIC Boston.
Now that you’ve seen the potential of one of these events, join the Venture Café folks at the next one! The next Mini-Conference will be Robotics Connect on Thursday, September 28.
