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The HAE Boston Investor Series is the perfect place for local entrepreneurs to hear first-hand what the investors in their area are looking for. 

The series continues with Bill Warner, Founder of Avid Technology Inc. and Chairman and Lead Investor at Lightcraft Technology. Bill is a seasoned tech founder, and angel investor with expertise in tech startups and concept stage ventures. He prefers to work with companies early on and often chooses to invest in a founder, rather than an idea. Bill will discuss what it means to build a startup from the heart, and how to differentiate yourself as a compelling founder. 

This event is perfect for alums who want to hear from a founder turned angel investor, get to know the Boston founders community, and grow their local Harvard network. The session will include a chance to network with our guest and attendees at HAE HQs on Sophya.

SPEAKER INTERESTS

• Early-stage investing, founders working from the heart, helping others tell their story, and technology.

ABOUT BILL WARNER

Bill Warner is an Angel Investor and experienced Technology Founder. He loves the process of starting and building great companies and has founded many successful ventures. 

In 1987 Bill started Avid Technology, Inc., and today Avid is the world leader in video, film, and music editing systems. Bill won the Emmy in 1993 and accepted the Oscar for Avid in 1999. In 1991 he started Wildfire Communications along with co-founders Nick d'Arbleloff, Rich Miner, and Tony Lovell. They built a ground-breaking speech-based electronic assistant that worked over the phone. It sounds much like Siri does today, and that’s because Siri gathered its inspiration from Wildfire 20 years earlier! Wildfire was sold to Orange, PLC in 2000. In 1999 Bill started FutureBoston - now mapjunction.com - which lets you understand the story of a place by looking at precisely aligned maps over time. 

Today, Bill is Chairman of Lightcraft Technology, Inc wwwlightcrafttech.com. Demos at bit.ly/lightcraft1 and bit.ly/lightcraft3. Lightcraft is building a totally new way to do video and film production and post-production with a focus on combining normal shooting with 3D backgrounds. This makes for dramatically more creativity, speed and flexibility even in low-cost productions.

Bill believes that shared workspaces are one key to creating the energy and relationships for startups so, in 2002, he created a shared workspace called the Collaboration Space at Warner Research, in Cambridge, near Fresh Pond. Bill started long before WeWork and grew the company to 1/94,000th of its value. But he didn’t go bankrupt.

Starting in 2004, and continuing to today, Bill has been working on techniques to help entrepreneurs build their startup from the heart. It turns out there is more to life than the Minimum Viable Product.

Bill began his education at Washington University in St. Louis and grew his love for technology during his time at MIT.

A recording of this session will be available on HAE Connect, our members-only networking platform, two weeks after the event date and will be released via the HAE YouTube channel at a later date.