Casing the Startup Joint: Real Life Examples of Startup Opportunities, Issues, & Strategic Decision Making

In August of 2007, Charlie founded Path 101, a NYC-based startup company focused on career discovery on the web. The company is the culmination of over 7 years of efforts in the career education space starting and running mentoring programs, internship programs, and recently teaching as an adjunct at Fordham University.

Charlie is also the founder of nextNY, a grassroots a participant-driven organization of almost 1,000 up and coming digital media and technology professionals in NYC—the largest in the area.

Previously, as the Director of Consumer Products for Oddcast, he helped launch the company’s first direct to consumer avatar platform, Voki. He was responsible Voki’s product vision, functional specifications, and initial business and marketing strategy.

His initial entrance into the NYC technology scene came as an analyst for Union Square Ventures. There, Charlie focused on early stage investments in technology enabled service businesses such as del.icio.us, Indeed.com, Feedburner, BugLabs, Etsy, and Oddcast.

Prior to joining Union Square Ventures, he spent four years at the General Motors pension fund’s $6 billion private markets group, where he worked extensively on venture capital partnerships focusing on emerging technology as well as private equity investments in the consumer sector.

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Albert combines over 10 years of entrepreneurial experience with an in-depth technology background. He has founded, or co-founded five companies, including a management consulting firm (in Germany), a hosted data analytics company, a technology subsidiary for Telebanc (now E*Tradebank), an early stage investment firm, and most recently (with his wife), DailyLit, a service for reading books by email or RSS. Albert also served as the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo. His technology background goes back to winning the German national computer science competition at age 18. Albert graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. He has managed technology projects for organizations as diverse as Tacoda (startup) and Telebanc (leading Internet bank). Albert currently serves on the boards of Clickable, a platform for managing online advertising; and Maptuit, a provider of realtime navigation; he is a board observer at Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods. Albert is married with three kids and lives in Scarsdale, New York.