Biography Wikipedia
Wikipedia:
Julie Meyer is an American-born entrepreneur, investor, business adviser, networking expert, broadcaster, and business commentator. She is the founder and Chief Executive of Ariadne Capital and the Managing Partner of Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund (ACE).
She is the founder of Entrepreneur Country and was the co-founder of First Tuesday sold in July 2000 to Yazam, a subsidiary of Jerusalem Global, for $50 million.
Meyer is also one of the two dragons on the BBC’s Dragons' Den online and is a regular columnist for the business paper City A.M. and regularly contributes to The Daily Telegraph’s business pages.
She has won awards including the World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (October 2000) and a place in the Wall Street Journal’s 30 most influential women in Europe. She was also cited as one of INSEAD’s ‘50 alumni who have changed the world’ (2010).
Early life and education
Meyer was born in Dearborn, Michigan, but moved to Sacramento, California, when she was one month old. Her father, also an entrepreneur, is a pulmonary doctor who founded Pulmonary Medicine Associates in Carmichael, CA in the early 1970s; her mother was an assistant to a lawyer.
She received a B.A. in English Literature and Humanities from Valparaiso University and her M.B.A. from INSEAD in France.
Meyer is a Lutheran.
Early career
Meyer spent her early 20s in Paris from 1988 to 1993 where she taught English. She later worked as a consultant for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 3Com and Hewlett Packard.
From 1993 to 1996, she worked for Andy Cunningham at Cunningham Communications in Boston where she consulted for Motorola on the PowerPC Alliance.
In 1997, she took her M.B.A. at INSEAD and in 1998 she went to London and co-founded the networking forum First Tuesday.
Business ventures
First Tuesday
In 1998, Meyer started working in London for NewMedia Investors (now Spark Ventures) where she helped advise companies including Lastminute.com, WGSN and Arc Cores to build their teams, raise capital and establish themselves internationally.
In October 1998, together with journalists Nick Denton and John Browning and investment banker Adam Gold, Meyer started organising networking events for new media entrepreneurs and business people on the first Tuesday of every month. It then became known as First Tuesday. Under Meyer's direction, First Tuesday expanded into 17 cities across Europe. The Wall Street Journal (Europe edition) covered the international launch to 17 cities on the 7th of September 1999.
Ariadne Capital
After Meyer left First Tuesday, she set up Ariadne Capital in August 2000, an investment and advisory firm based on an ‘Entrepreneurs backing Entrepreneurs’ model, providing investment and advisory services to entrepreneurs in the media (broadcasting, publishing, music, gaming, advertising) and the internet (including mobile internet) sectors. Clients that Ariadne backed in the early years include Espotting (now MIVA), Kashya (later sold to EMC) and Skype (later sold to Ebay). Most recently Ariadne Capital acted as sole financial advisor to BeatThatQuote.com on its sale to Google.
Entrepreneur Country
Entrepreneur Country (founded by Meyer in 2008) is a network of investors, entrepreneurs, corporate organisations and media partners. The group network congregates bi-annually and also gathers online for information exchange, inspiration and to make connections.
Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund (ACE)
In September 2009, Meyer announced the first Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund (ACE). She is the managing partner of the fund which will invest in internet and mobile internet companies at the seed stage.
Media career and other work
Dragons' Den (online)
In March 2009 Julie Meyer became a dragon on the online version of BBC’s Dragons' Den where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of potential investors known as ‘dragons’. Joining Meyer on the panel is Shaf Rasul, founder of Edinburgh optical storage distributor E-Net Computers and an investor in property and internet companies.
The production shows online video pitches from entrepreneurs and the subsequent interaction between entrepreneurs and panel judges/investors, £50,000 being the maximum amount of money that the judges can individually invest in any one business. The videos are published weekly and audiences can participate by, for example, rating business plans.
The show is hosted by BBC Radio 1 breakfast newsreader Dominic Byrne.
Other media work
Meyer appeared as a business commentator on the BBC (on shows including Newsnight, BBC Breakfast and BBC news online) and CNBC. Also, in addition to her column for City A.M., she has contributed to publications such as Bloomberg Businessweek, Computing, FT Digital Business and Spectator Business.
Julie Meyer has pioneered the understanding and analysis of the industrial framework - 'Ecosystem Economics'TM - previously published in the Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian. This model, which she was the first to apply to the post web 2.0 world, refers to the network-orientation of all business in the next phase of industrial development. The winners, according to Meyer and Ariadne Capital, will be those companies who organise the business model in their ecosystem for all parties in the transaction. Ariadne seeks to accelerate the momentum of fast-growing technology-based businesses. Meyer and Ariadne use "Ecosystem Economics"TM to refer to how to launch and grow new businesses where the alignment of multiple entities in the marketplace are required to ensure success."Ecosystem Economics" is a trademark of Ariadne Capital.
Julie provided comment for the Financial Times on the Davies Report (an inquiry into female representation in the boardroom) and also on 'Why entrepreneurship is so important'. She was used by Financial Times as a commentator on the UK Budget 2011, looking at its effect on small and medium businesses.