We discussed: 

1. How the local and national startup ecosystem is faring during this crisis 

2. Investment outlook in short and medium term 

3. Advice for entrepreneurs in these unprecedented and challenging times 

4. Vroom IPO 

Jay Bhatti is a founding venture partner with BrandProject Capital. Jay is also an active angel investor in New Jersey start-ups. Due to Jay’s work in the startup community in New Jersey, Jay was nominated for Venture Capitalist of the Year in New Jersey in 2017 by the New Jersey Tech Council. Jay has given a TEDxAsburyPark talk on innovation and has been featured in various publications such as Time Magazine, BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur Magazine, ABC News, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, NBC News, World News, and the Financial Times. 

Prior to BrandProject, Jay was the co-founder of spock.com, the leading social search engine in the world based in the heart of Silicon Valley. Spock raised over $10m in venture funding and powered search for leading social networks like bebo, hi5, friendster and tagged. 

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Brian Smiga is the co-founding partner at Alpha Venture Partners, an innovative late-stage venture fund that invests growth capital in category-leading technology companies sourced from a network of 400+ early stage venture firms. Brian also serves as an advisor to Pritzker Group Venture Capital, a twenty-year old venture firm that’s invested in 200+ technology companies. He is founder of TEDxAsburyPark, the largest TED conference on the east coast. 

Prior to Alpha Venture Partners, Brian was the CEO and founder of Preclick, (sold to Smilebox), where he developed popular photo software licensed worldwide by HP, 3M, Sandisk, Walmart, Costco, CVS, and Walgreens. Prior to Preclick, Mr. Smiga was CEO at 3Path, (sold to Cadmus), an Intel and Goldman-Sachs backed early “Dropbox”, and the SVP of Product & Marketing at 1ClickCharge, an early “Paypal”, where his leadership resulted in a profitable exit to CMGi.