YES plans weekend conference

On Thurs., Feb. 8, The Yale Entrepreneurial Society (YES) will host "YES New York: The Yale Venture Summit" at the Yale Club of New York. The event, designed to bring together current students, alumni, professors, and leading businessmen, is organized around a panel discussion entitled "Building After the Bubble." The panel will address Internet entrepreneurialism after the depreciation of Internet stocks over the past year.

"This is the first one of its kind [for Yale]," David Pozen, TC '02, president of YES, said. "We wanted to do an event that would bring together our alumni mentors, and New York was the obvious place to start." He went on to note that a lot of alumni are interested in learning about Yale, especially the recent business-related developments on campus and upcoming Y50K Entrepreneurial Competition. This event also provides the perfect opportunity for "general networking."

"There will be some of that [networking] and some learning about what YES does," Pozen said. "And the main event of the night will be the panel. Now that the dot-coms have crashed, how to go about building significant businesses?" The panelists trying to answer that question are prominent members of the business community led by Robert C. Pozen, David's father, president of Fidelity Management & Research and vice chairman of Fidelity. He will be joined by Henry Blodget, senior internet and e-commerce analyst at Merrill Lynch; Frederick Frank, vice chairman of Lehman Brothers; Dev Bhatia, founder and CEO of HotSocket; Dave Edwards, managing partner at Charles River Ventures; David Cromwell, adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Yale School of Management and former CEO of J.P. Morgan Capital.

"We leveraged my father to help get all of the other people," Pozen explained.

Events such as "YES New York" serve to renew interest in Yale as a place for entrepreneurship, Pozen said. He also said it furthers YES' larger goal of creating a "comprehensive national capital network through which Yalies—students, professors, and alums—have access to one another. Through YES, they have the ability to find potential resources and partners for their entrepreneurial endeavors." For example, through events like "YES New York," students with a business idea may find an alum willing to advise them or help secure funding. On the flip side, former Yalies may want to meet potential employees or protégés. Pozen noted that over 100 interested alumni pre-registered for YES New York before the event was even publicized.

Its organizers expect the summit to draw several hundred people. While admission is free for Yale students, faculty, alumni, and guests, registration costs $200 for all others. Several sponsors—including Mintz Levin Bank; Gerson Lehrman Group, a New York-based research company; and Blue Harbor Ventures, a venture capital fu-nd—are footing part of the $25,000 cost of the event.

Expectations for this event are so high that the New York Observer plans to run a story on it, and the Yale Club of Boston has already signed on to host YES Boston in the fall of 2001.

Pozen is very optimistic about the event and its significance for Yale students. "It's probably too much to say that this marks a concrete step of Yale's into the new economy," he said. "But it certainly represents a change."

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