Tanya Ulster serves as Creative Director at Two Sevens. They have been with Two Sevens in some capacity since February 2012, starting as a design intern. They serve on the board of AIGA Philadelphia as Vice President, and have been active in the organization since 2016. They grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania and went to school at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. They live in West Philly where their hobbies include painting, vegan cooking, and community organizing.
Taking a company from ideation to exit is an exciting process. From raising seed investment through to scaling a concept internationally, it takes a mountain of grit and determination to make it a success. In a fireside chat, John Snyder, CEO of Grapeshot which successfully exited to Oracle in 2018, will shed light on his journey as a tech founder.
We will also be welcoming ieso digital health, Evonetix, IQ Capital, and Fluidic Analytics to a panel, chaired by venture partner and healthtech investor Vishal Gulati, discussing "How to raise your Series A?". They will cover challenges of building a company, problems solved along the way, and provide advice to early stage founders on raising capital from a range of international investors.
Several members of the Draper Esprit team will be in attendance and look forward to welcoming you.
John Snyder is the former CEO and Co-Founder of Grapeshot, who built Grapeshot into a global leader in contextual intelligence selling it to Oracle in 2018. John has spent his whole career in the field of information retrieval and keyword technology, with a successful exit of the Muscat information search business in 1997, and a series of investments in hi-tech start-ups. He holds a BA Honours degree from the University of Cambridge, where he remains an Enterprise Fellow at the Judge Business School.
Sarah is a BABCP accredited cognitive behavioural therapist and has delivered over 27,000 hours of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to people across the UK. Sarah was the business founder of the first primary care CBT service commissioned by the NHS. Sarah joined Ieso Digital Health in 2012, she is responsible for managing a team of 500 psychological therapists and leading a team of senior clinicians to address the international problem of stagnating recovery rates for common mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. Sarah has established key methodologies for monitoring the quality of evidence based psychological therapies and innovative pedagogical processes with the function of enabling clinicians to be the best they can. Sarah was recently
announced as one of 2018’s Movers and Shakers as a UK leader in healthcare.
Tim Brears is Chief Executive Officer of Evonetix Ltd, a Cambridge-based company developing a radically different approach to gene synthesis. He previously served as Chief Executive of a number of bioscience companies, including Xention, a biopharmaceutical company specialising in the discovery and development of ion-channel-modulating drugs for the control of atrial fibrillation, and Gendaq, a company focused on the development of zinc finger proteins for gene regulation. Prior to that, he spent ten years in the US, initially as a long-term fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organisation at Rockefeller University, New York, and subsequently as Director of Licensing at Ciba-Geigy (later Novartis) Agribusiness in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
Kerry has over 20 years’ venture capital experience starting with Venture Technologies, a $50m deep tech fund in 1997 achieving high profile exits including Autonomy (IPO), Whereonearth (Yahoo), Trustbase (SunMicrosytems) and Durlacher (IPO). She also worked with an Italian Venture Capital Fund before co-founding IQ Capital. Kerry focuses on product, market strategy and team dynamics. She sits on several boards including BMLL, Divido, Apperio, KisanHub and BloomsburyAI and led Sirigen’s exit (Beckton Dickinson). Kerry sits on the BVCA Venture Capital Committee and is a Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Cambridge University, Judge Business School.
Vishal Gulati is a healthtech VC at the leading European investment firm, Draper Esprit. Vishal is a qualified physician and prior to Draper Esprit worked on the Human Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust and at Atlas Venture as a biotech investor.
Since 2012, he has been the leading promoter of digital and data driven health in the European VC sector and has led investments in PushDoctor, Clue, LifeSum, Ieso Digital Health, Horizon Discovery plc, and Fluidic Analytics.
