‘In an information society, the way you use information as a weapon determines your success.” Steve Papa, the founder and CEO of Endeca, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based information technology search company, gave this quote to Forbes for a November article on how corporations search for information. Papa gives a free talk on “Building a Pre-IPO Company in the Face of Recession, War, and Google,” on Thursday, February 9, at 5:30 p.m. at the Friend Center Auditorium at Princeton University.
Papa’s talk is the second in a technology entrepreneurship lecture series. The lectures are sponsored by Princeton Engineering’s Center for Innovation in Engineering Education (CIEE) (www.princeton.edu/%7Eseasweb/ciee/) in collaboration with the Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network. The lectures are followed by a reception where students, faculty, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and angel investors meet informally to discuss ideas and exchange knowledge and advice.
“This lecture series will strengthen connections between students, faculty, entrepreneurs and investors in the region,” said Ken Kay, the chairman of Jumpstart, a group that invests in early-stage technology companies in the Mid-Atlantic region, in a prepared statement. “I hope some potential entrepreneurs will be inspired to pursue their dreams.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Cambridge-based Endeca pioneered “guided navigation,” a search technology for businesses that gives employees better and more efficient access to their company’s own data. The Forbes article said that “his (Papa’s) company competes with a slew of others in getting corporations to use their software and hardware to mine the immense amounts of data that sit in various places and forms behind a company’s firewall.”
