zokos
"Kickstarter for parties" -TIME
- Stage Full Product Ready
- Industry Internet / Web Services
- Location New York City, NY, USA
- Currency USD
- Founded June 2011
- Employees 5
- Website zokos.com
Company Summary
Zokos are a new kind of get together. We believe social media shouldn't just be online. Our goal is to use the connectivity of the web to make real-life socializing as frictionless as possible. We've started by addressing the cost of getting together. We apply the mechanics of crowdfunding to social gatherings, making it easy to pool our money together so we can afford to throw better parties than ever before.
Team
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Christopher KieranCo-Founder & CEO
Christopher has been a food-tech entrepreneur, a journalist at McGraw HIll, and head of research at the Yale Center for Business & the Environment. He is notorious among friends for throwing parties where guests recreate entire scenes from MGM musicals or perform Noel Coward numbers in tails. He has lived in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, studied voice at Vienna’s Schubert Conservatory and dance at Juilliard, and performed in a circus.
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Bradley BaerCo-Founder & CPO
As an architect with Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake, Brad worked on the design, fabrication, and assembly of the Cellophane House for the MoMA. The entire four story building was erected on-site in only 16 days and visited by 750,000+ people. He holds an MArch from Yale. Around the dinner table he can be heard cracking jokes which somehow work both on his grandparents’ Iowa farm and in the penthouse apartments he designed as an architect.
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Roger VandervortCo-Founder & CTO
In addition to architecting zokos.com, Roger has built productivity and scheduling applications and worked on capacity planning software at Bayer. He has worked in IT positions ranging from consulting to corporate. In addition to loving dinner parties, Roger loves form-fitting polyester golf shirts and obscure 90’s ska bands.
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Andrew HapkeCo-Founder & CMO
Before receiving his MBA from Yale, Andrew worked in small business finance in the U.S. and abroad. In India he conceived, piloted, and launched a microfinance program that supports village entrepreneurs. He also co-founded the San Diego Microfinance Alliance. Andrew loves eating, and he has been known to chew with his mouth open on more than one occasion (he apologizes in advance to mothers everywhere).
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Christopher SmothersSenior Developer
Christopher is an accomplished human full of acumen. When he is not busy checking brilliantly broken code into the Zokos repository, he can can be found in the wild being bucked from rocks he probably should not be playing with. He graduated from Brown with a degree in Storytelling and now spends his days writing programs that help people who do not have a storytelling degree.
Advisors
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John Chory, Partner, Latham & WatkinsLawyerUnconfirmedRory Gildea, Gildea & Associates (referred by SVB)AccountantUnconfirmed
Previous Investors
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Steve McClelland, Social & Personalization Products, Yahoo!UnconfirmedBetaspring Startup AcceleratorUnconfirmedRyan Johnson, VP, Wells Fargo Capital FinanceUnconfirmed
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