Friday Q&A: Dan McKinney of NextStage Capital

Forget the latest investment trends, NextStage Capital will do what it wants, thank you very much.

The firm was founded by Rob Adams and Dan McKinney -two ex-Safeguard Scientifics employees – and Terry Williams, a former recruiter during the post-dotcom boom year of 2003. Then, most investors were running away from early stage technology investment.

“There can be opportunity when people are fleeing markets,” says McKinney,  a managing partner.

It  firm has invested in 12 companies with four exits, mostly in the mid-atlantic region going as far west as to Pittsburgh. However, since its founding the firm has taken pride in being the contrarian, and has not made any new investments in 2010, choosing instead to reinvest its dollars in current portfolio companies.

After the jump, McKinney promises us that we will be hearing a lot from NextStage in the coming months and gives his take on the age-old debate about whether Philly needs more investment dollars.

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Friday Q&A: Chris Lehmann, Science Leadership Academy

SLA principal Chris Lehmannn speaks at TEDxNYED in March 2010

If you ask Chris Lehmann how he became the principal of the Science Leadership Academy, he’ll just laugh.

“That’s a loooong and complicated story,” he says.

The Philly-native has been the only principal in the SLA’s four-year history and has been an unabashed cheerleader for innovation in our nation’s education system, speaking at TEDxNYED, Ignite Philly and, most recently, the Supernova Hub conference last month about the subject.

The Science Leadership Academy, located near Logan Square, is a partnership between The Franklin Institute and the School District of Philadelphia that focuses primarily on science and technology. At SLA, every student receives a laptop and the school encourages “inquiry-based learning” that eschews tests for projects and collaboration.

When we caught up with Lehmann he was busy preparing for the upcoming school year and anxious to see how the first graduating class of the SLA fared in its first college semester. Below we ask him what’s the one word he reads everyday for inspiration and why innovating at a school is harder than at a startup.

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Frank Eliason formerly of @ComcastCares talks customer service and moving on

In the pantheon of social media, Frank Eliason is certainly something of a celebrity.

He was the start of a social media craze from Comcast, chasing down and responding to online complaints from customers. In the history book of social media, Eliason, who popularized Twitter handle @ComcastCares, will be among the forefathers of the movement.

After beginning in September 2007, his role was buffeted with a team of Comcast tweeters and blog readers and outreach specialists.

Nearly as well known as complaints about Comcast service were the signs of that Eliason’s team was listening. It was a strange juxtaposition, an attempt to move a mountain of negative perception with a relatively small team of persistent web-based professionals.

And Eliason was at the start of what has become accepted as the norm.

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Friday Q&A: Gil Beyda of Genacast Ventures

Genacast Ventures Managing Partner Gil Beyda

Gil Beyda, originally from Los Angeles, has Dave Morgan to thank for bringing him to Philadelphia.

When Beyda and Morgan founded Real Media in 1995, they chose to locate the online ad serving company in Fort Washington because of the cheap office space available there.

After selling the company to 24 /7 Media, the duo teamed up again in 2001 to create Tacoda, a behavorial advertising company that they then sold to AOL in 2007. With two exits under his belt, Beyda was ready to try something new.

“I was not a corporate AOL guy, so I set off to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up… again,” says Beyda.

Eventually, he settled on a second career as an investor, teaming with Comcast to create Genecast Ventures. In its short existence, the new fund already has four portfolio companies and a successful exit in Invite Media and Beyda says that he looks to be more active in the months to come.

We chatted with Beyda about what companies he likes to invest in and why Philadelphia’s investor ecosystem is just fine, thank you. Oh, and we critique his LinkedIn profile.

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Mayor Nutter on government transparency, city CTO and business retention

Copyright City of Philadelphia. Photograph by Mitchell Leff.

Since we launched a year-and-a-half ago, we’ve not only watched, but followed as closely as we could City of Philadelphia technology policy.

Even in our short tenure covering all that is involved — like municipal information technology, government transparency, citywide broadband network infrastructure, economic policy and much, much more — we’ve been witness to a city intent on finding new ways of utilizing technology and finding better ways of connecting with citizens.

Throughout, we’ve heard repeatedly from leaders that Mayor Michael Nutter understands the value of technology in city government and he is intent on involving Philadelphia’s technology community.

Though we write about these initiatives weekly, nothing was more of a reminder of the Mayor’s commitment to technology than when Nutter announced a $120 million capital investment in the Division of Technology during the pageantry of his budget address to City Council in March.

And with his support, DOT has been steered in a new direction, a Chief Technology Officer appointed to the mayoral cabinet, pilot programs created to attract technology businesses and broadband stimulus dollars and gigabit broadband chased.

So, we had to get the man on the phone to talk tech. Yesterday, we spoke with Mayor Nutter about government transparency, Philadelphia’s tax structure, and about his call to action to Philadelphia’s technology community. Our Q&A with Philadelphia’s Mayor after the jump.

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Where’s the data? A ten year old problem, city CTO says

For all the city information technology issues that Allan Frank addresses daily, its perhaps the availability of transparent city data that plagues him most publicly.

Sure, IT consolidation efforts mandated by mayoral executive order — which have transformed the Division of Technology from an agency once one-fifth the size it is now — have been a priority for Frank, the city’s Chief Technology Officer.

But often, the cry from the city’s industrious technology community has been one caused by a national intrigue in government transparency that tech can facilitate.

Cities like New York — which opened an impressive amount of city datasets for public use, and sponsored a $20,000 contest to attract software developers to create interesting technology applications and web apps — are pressing ahead with new data initiatives.

But Philadelphia lags behind. The city’s first big data win came when SEPTA released raw data around station geolocation and schedules, well after developers took their own stab at collecting data — by scraping HTML pages. Since, we’ve seen little movement from either developers or the city.

When we first covered Frank in May last year, he spoke before a crowd of Refresh Philly attendees and gave them a charge to come up with data they wanted. The effort dwindled, due in part to a lack of movement in the community and too, on actionable steps from the city.

Now, as Frank enters his first fiscal year with a serious $120 million capital investment in city technology, we’re wondering what’s next.

Late last week, we met with the CTO to discuss problems plaguing the department around opening those datasets and followed-up with Frank about how things have been for the last year, his first in public office. After the jump, that conversation.

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Friday Q&A: Jim Richardson of Electronic Ink, Philly’s “best kept secret”

Update: removed company names.

If you’ve ever kept a cheat sheet or post-it note by your desk to help you navigate your company’s bloated software, Electronic Ink wants to help.

“A lot of software is given to coders without any consideration of the end user and how they want to use the application,” says Jim Richardson VP of business development at Electronic Ink and a Temple grad.

Electronic Ink, located a stone’s throw from City Hall, is a design firm that helped IBM design OS/2 and helped Citibank create and design the first ATM machines.

“Think about it,” says Richardson of the design challenges posed by ATMS, “getting people to move from the bank lobby to the corner without any training [is remarkable].”

The company of roughly 100 employees specializes in helping businesses simplify applications and software, often through simple design tweaks to help end users stop from pulling their hair out and to help save companies money. The company has racked up hundreds of clients since its early days of ATM design.

We chatted with Richardson about making financial markets safer through design, saving one utility company millions and why his firm plans to no longer be Philadelphia’s best kept secret.

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Timothy Allen talks about education innovation at Wharton

Timothy Allen has to clarify.

Timothy Allen of Wharton

The programmer and analyst with Wharton Research Data Services is something of a community organizer to boot and July is busy enough that Allen has to make sure that the record is set straight.

There are three events — “very exciting events” Allen clarifies — happening at Wharton in the coming weeks. These clusters often happen on campuses when most students are elsewhere.

In addition to the East Coast debut of the famed decade-old Supernova conference that, for full disclosure, Technically Philly is co-sponsoring at the month’s end, in two weeks, Wharton is also home to two events dedicated to innovation in education.

Allen says that has something to say about Wharton and what the relationship of the city’s technology community to education can mean for the region’s future.

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Friday Q&A: Kevin Kemmerer of Safeguard Scientifics

Updated: Corrected numbers, general edits.

Of the many investment firms in Philadelphia, there is no one quite like Safeguard Scientifics.

In Internet years the company is ancient. Founded in 1953,  one of its early investments was Jerrold Electronics, a company that eventually saw its cable operations bought out by Ralph Roberts to become a little company named “Comcast.” Since then, the company has been a staple of the local investment community surviving the Web 1.0 days to emerge stronger than ever. Since 2006, Safeguard has invested $175 million.

While most firms receive money from private individuals with tight strings attached,  Safeguard is one of the small handful of firms to be publicly traded. Being publicly traded allows the company to be much more patient with its 17 partner companies, avoiding situations like the recent Zappos deal where the company’s investors forced it to sell to Amazon.

But Safeguard is most proud of what it calls its “operating platform”: a series of legal, administrative and operational services to help its investments quickly grow revenue.

We chatted with Kevin Kemmerer, EVP and managing director of Safeguard’s technology group about investing locally, the company’s much-respected “operating platform” and what entrepreneurs can do to get Safeguard’s attention.

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Friday Q&A: Novitas Capital and PACT’s Dean Miller, silobuster

When Technically Philly gave Dean Miller a ring yesterday, he admitted to spending the majority of the conversation staring out of the window.

“We have our summer celebration tonight, and I’m worried about this thunderstorm,” he says.

Miller, a partner at Novitas Capital, shouldn’t be worrying. For one, the event is inside. Two: Ealier this month Miller oversaw the merging of two of the regions high profile technology groups: Eastern Technology Council and Mid-Atlantic Capital Alliance. Both had the similar mission of helping foster technology entrepreneurship and investing.

“We knew that if you put them side by side you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart,” says Miller. As head of the MAC Alliance, Miller helped oversee the consolidation of the two groups into the Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technology, or PACT.

“We’re kind of a one stop shop and strategic hub now whether you are an investor or an entrepreneur,” he says.

We chatted with the local tech veteran about the roaring 90s, PACT’s new event strategy and Miller’s plans for world domination.

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