Join us on Wednesday, September 9 from 12-1PM to hear from Yuanyuan "YY" Zhou on how to make entrepreneurial "lemonade" during tough times.
Entrepreneurs have one of the toughest jobs. We do whatever to help our "baby" survive and thrive. Unfortunately, real life and markets often welcome us with thunderstorms. As captains of our ship, we have to steer it through these turmoils. In this talk, we will share our limited experience and many lessons learned when we adapt and grow Whova from a people search technology/app into event apps, as well as how we quickly pivoted to virtual events in order to survive the pandemic and surprisingly even grow our company further.
Dr. YY Zhou is a Qualcomm Chair Professor at UCSD. Prior to UCSD, she was a tenured professor in computer science at Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her area of expertise includes computer reliability, data center management, and operating systems. She obtained her Ph.D from Princeton University. She is an ACM Fellow (2013) and IEEE Fellow (2015), Sloan Research Fellow (2007) and the winner of ACM Mark Weiser award (2015). She is always proud of her former and current MS and Ph.D students, six of whom have joined top universities as tenured or tenure-track faculty, and several of them were successful entrepreneurs. In parallel to her academic career, she has also co-founded three companies. Her second company, Pattern Insight, a spin off from her research group at Univ of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was successfully acquired by VmWare, a large public company, in 2012. Since 2014, she has been busy with her third startup, Whova. It has gained substantial customer traction worldwide and has helped more than 15,000 conferences/events in 95 countries. Now it employs around 70 people in San Diego and plans to expand to Illinois to better serve more customers.
Please register to join our virtual event here: https://illinois.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEld-qsrDssGtWa1f-_YphxX-s2uEJY31Eo
If you are interested in seeing what benefits Whova offers, please click here.
Interested in attending more of Research Park’s Startup Cafés?
Startup Cafe with Eli Lazar: The Entrepreneurial Journey of SNOOZ
Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Time: 12-1PM
Startup Cafe with Robin Berthier: The Entrepreneurial Journey of Network Perception
Date: Thursday, October 29, 2020
Time: 12-1PM
Startup Café with Zeba Parkar: An Entrepreneurial Journey
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Time: 12-1PM
If you have questions, or need accommodations for this event, please contact Cathy McArthur at mcarthur@illinois.edu.
