NEXT is a complete hands-on program for developing and validating your business idea based on a comprehensive curriculum rooted in Steve Blank's Customer Development methodology, built around in-person interactions with potential customers and delivered by our accredited NEXT instructor - Tim Clark.

What you will learn: how to generate assumptions to validate about your assumed customer's needs, motivations and their behaviors; how to find and reach out to people for interviews that match your assumed customer segments; how to define experiments that validate or invalidate assumptions you have about your business model; how to develop your own customer discovery interview plan; how to conduct effective customer discovery interviews; and how to turn customer feedback into real insight.

• Week 1, The Art of Customer Discovery, June 19th 6:00pm to 9:00pm
• Week 2, Opportunity Assessment, June 26th 6:00pm to 9:00pm
• Week 3, Team Presentations, July 3rd 6:00pm to 9:00pm
• Week 4, Team Presentations, July 10th 6:00pm to 9:00pm
• Week 5, NEXT Final Presentations, July 17th 6:00pm to 9:00pm

Grab your co-founders and enroll today!

How Next Glass Combines Science, Machine Learning, and Augmented Reality to Empower Consumers

Next Glass was founded in 2012 on the premise of using science and software to ensure beer and wine drinkers never taste another bad beverage. Through patent-pending technology, Next Glass is cataloging the taste profiles of tens of thousands of bottles of beer and wine by chemically extracting the “DNA” of each using high-res accurate mass spectrometry to develop the world’s only Genome Cellar™. These pure and objective taste profiles (we collect tens of thousands of data points from each bottle of beer and wine) are then coupled with sophisticated machine-learning software and user preference data to create an incredibly accurate recommendation and discovery engine. Next Glass leverages augmented reality functionality to deliver these highly-accurate wine and beer recommendations to users on their mobile devices.

Trace will explain how each of these elements (science, machine learning, and augmented reality) benefit beer and wine consumers and how Next Glass stumbled upon the idea to combine them to do so.

Doors will open at 5:30p. The food and drinks are provided by Bellagios and New Relic. The presentation will begin right at 6p. Then stick around for a special post-event happy hour! You'll get to taste some Oregon beer and wine ... then be one of the first to demo the Next Glass app live at the event, and receive priority access to the beta later this month!

Please RSVP via Eventbrite HERE

Trace Smith is the Chief Operating Officer at Next Glass. Prior to joining Next Glass, Trace was an Associate with Quad-C Management, a billion-dollar private equity fund specializing in investing in profitable businesses valued between $50 million and $500 million and growing them in partnership with management. During his time at Quad-C, he closed two leveraged recapitalizations, one buy-side transaction, and one dividend recapitalization, in addition to his other responsibilities, which included evaluating potential leveraged buyout transactions and monitoring Quad-C's portfolio companies. Prior to joining Quad-C in 2012, Smith was a Senior Analyst at Fennebresque & Co., where he focused on advisory work in transactions including mergers and acquisitions and private capital raises across multiple industries. Trace graduated summa cum laude with honors in finance from Wake Forest University, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa. He is also a graduate of Woodberry Forest School, where he was a Noland Fellow.

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