TechCrunch is pleased to announce our second monthly Include office hours. On November 17th, Ryan Sweeney and Dan Levine of Accel Partners will join TechCrunch editors in providing advice and feedback to startups.
Launched in 2014, Include is TechCrunch’s diversity program, aimed at facilitating opportunities for underrepresented groups in tech to take their startups to the next level.
Office hours are part of that effort. Once monthly, TechCrunch will work with VC partners to provide feedback and advice to early-stage companies. To be considered for a meeting in the November Session with Accel by Monday, November 9, at noon PT, fill out the application here.
Underrepresented groups in tech include but are not limited to Black, Latino, Native American, LGBT and female founders. For our first session, we’d prefer teams that are based in the Bay Area, as office hours will be held at the TechCrunch Office in San Francisco. Future office hours will be hosted in San Francisco, as well as other startup hubs.
Now, for a little about our co-hosts.
Ryan Sweeney joined Accel in 2008 and manages its growth fund. He is the first outside investor and board member in a number of leading enterprise software companies like Atlassian, Hootsuite, Qualtrics, Squarespace and Xero. Ryan is also active with innovative mobile and payments startups like Invoice2go, Lightspeed and VSCO.
Ryan was also responsible for numerous investments with notable exits, including AirWatch (acquired by VMware), Braintree/Venmo (acquired by PayPal), Groupon (public), Lynda.com (acquired by LinkedIn) and OzForex (public).
Daniel Levine first joined Accel in 2010 and focuses on next-generation developer and open-source communities. Dan currently works with the teams at Checkr, Trifacta and others. He rejoined Accel after spending time at Dropbox, where he worked on the platform team. He helped open the platform to third-party developers and launched and managed many of the company’s developer-facing initiatives. Earlier, Dan co-founded Chartio, a Y Combinator (S10)-backed startup in the data visualization space, and prior to Chartio, worked on CrunchBase at TechCrunch.
We’re thrilled to be working with Ryan and Daniel. Selected startups will have 20 minutes to pitch Ryan or Daniel and to get their advice on the biggest challenge facing their business. Please keep in mind the investment stage and sector focus on Ryan and Daniel when considering whether to apply. If you’re interested in attending, apply here by Monday, November 9, at noon PDT.