This month, we're pleased to host Roger Ehrenberg, celebrated New York angel investor, UM alum, and founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on big data investments.

Abstract:

Data has touched every industry for decades, so why is Big Data such a hot topic now? In this talk, Roger frames what Big Data means, how it's generated, and how scale companies and startups alike use data as an active asset. He compares sources of data and end-products for example companies, and discusses how to use data as a source of natural competitive advantage.

Bio:

Roger Ehrenberg is the founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures.

Roger currently sits on the boards of Datasift, Kinetic Global Markets, Metamarkets, Recorded Future, Simple, The Trade Desk and TransferWise, and is a Board observer of SavingStar. Formerly, he served on the boards of Alphacet, Buddy Media, Global Bay Mobile Technologies, Magnetic, Selerity and Stocktwits.

Prior to forming IA Ventures, Roger was an active angel investor through IA Capital Partners, a seed-stage investment firm focused on digital media and financial technology. From 2004 to 2009, Roger seeded 40 companies, including bit.ly, Buddy Media, Clickable, Global Bay Mobile Technologies (sold to VeriFone), Invite Media (sold to Google), Magnetic, MyTrade (sold to TD Ameritrade), Solve Media, Stocktwits, TheLadders, TweetDeck (sold to Twitter) and Wallstrip (sold to CBS Interactive).

Earlier in his career, Roger served as President and CEO of DB Advisors, LLC, Deutsche Bank’s internal hedge fund trading platform where his 130-person team managed $6 billion in capital across multiple strategies with offices in New York, London and Hong Kong. Before DB Advisors, Roger was Global Co-head of Deutsche Bank’s Strategic Equity Transactions Group. In 2000, Roger’s team won Institutional Investor magazine’s “Derivatives Deal of the Year” award. As an investment banker and Managing Director at Citibank, Roger held a variety of roles in the Global Derivatives, Capital Markets, Mergers & Acquisitions and Capital Structuring groups.

Roger holds an MBA in Finance, Accounting and Management from Columbia Business School and a BBA in Finance, Economics and Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan. Roger blogs at informationarbitrage.com and tweets at @infoarbitrage.