TechCrunch Founder Summit Agenda
The ideas, strategies, and connections that accelerate growth
Don’t miss a moment of these insightful sessions, the opportunity to ask industry leaders your questions, and the chance to build game-changing connections that drive growth. Save your seat now with pass discounts
November 4th
The Next Startup Advantage: Distribution Beats Technology
AI has made it easier than ever to build a product, but getting customers to discover, adopt and pay for it remains incredibly difficult. NEA investor Hunter Worland explores how the rules of customer acquisition are changing, why distribution can matter more than the underlying technology, and what early-stage founders should prioritize to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.
AMA with Toast Co-founder Steve Fredette
What does it take to build a company that keeps evolving long after its startup days? Toast co-founder and president Steve Fredette takes questions on scaling a business, navigating changing markets, and staying ahead of emerging technologies like agentic AI. From the decisions that shaped Toast’s growth to the challenges of continued innovation, this candid AMA gives founders a chance to dig into the lessons, missteps, and opportunities that come with building for the long haul.
Fundraising Trends
Ready to raise in 2027? Start here. In this practical session, founders will hear directly from early-stage investors about what gets their attention, what earns a meeting, and what separates fundable companies from the rest. We’ll cover the key elements of a successful fundraising strategy, from preparation and positioning to investor outreach and process management.
When to Scale and When to Hit the Brakes
Raising your first round is a milestone, but knowing what to do with that capital can make or break what comes next. Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner at Glasswing Ventures, will unpack the critical decisions founders face after their first raise. From hiring and product development to managing burn and measuring traction, she’ll explore when to accelerate, when to hold back, and how to avoid scaling before your startup is ready..
Data Room Best Practices: Reducing Friction in Due Diligence
A strong data room does more than store documents. It demonstrates operational discipline, builds investor confidence, and helps accelerate due diligence. Join us to discuss best practices, common pitfalls, and strategies for keeping your organization diligence-ready year-round.
How to Build Events Strategy Before You Can Afford a Full-Time Events Team
Early-stage founders approach events one of two ways: say yes to every opportunity, or avoid them entirely because the ROI feels impossible to justify. Neither is smart. Events can build your audience and credibility before product-market fit but only if you’re strategic about which ones deserve your time and budget. We’ll discuss how to think strategically when resources are tight, including how to maximize ROI from founder events like this one. You’ll leave with frameworks for prioritizing stage-appropriate event investments, tactics for proving value without complex tools, and clarity on when events make sense and when they don’t.
Finding Product Market Fit Before You Scale
Every founder wants product-market fit, but knowing when you’ve actually found it is far more complicated. Kent Bennett, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, will unpack how founders can validate demand, build an MVP that answers the right questions, and avoid scaling before the fundamentals are in place. This session explores the signals that matter, the metrics that mislead, and the decisions that separate enduring companies from expensive experiments.
Your First Vertical, and It Happens to Be the Hardest One
Hyro began in 2018 as a conversational AI voice tool and now serves more than 30 million healthcare patients across over 45 leading health systems. Many founders who start by building a horizontal tool find themselves in healthcare later; 55% of new AI unicorns in Q1 2025 were healthcare-focused (CB Insights)
The reality is, if you’re building an early stage startup in AI, you could be one deal away from navigating healthcare’s governance committees, procurement cycles, and compliance questions without a single industry relationship.
Chirag Shah, partner at Define Ventures, prevoiously served as Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Imagine360, where he led the Strategy, Analytics, and Product organizations and worked with employers ranging from 50 to 500,000 lives. Founders will leave with a simple framework for assessing healthcare as a market for their technology and where to start.
GraphRAG in Action: Stop Hallucinations with Knowledge Graphs
Are messy data sources causing your LLMs to hallucinate? Relational databases struggle to bridge the semantic gap for AI. Learn to build a production-ready GraphRAG pipeline that turns chaotic data into actionable insights. Actionable Takeaways:Build an offline pipeline to resolve disjointed datasets into “Golden Records.” Translate flat records into an interconnected Neo4j Knowledge Graph. Deploy a secure, local LLM (Ollama) to translate natural language into validated Cypher queries. Give your AI the foundational data structure it needs!
Lunch & Launch with Adobe for Startups
Adobe for Startups helps founders build the brand, content and customer reach that turn a single idea or product into the next big business. This is an invitation only event. Please check your inbox.
Brand Is Your Edge: How Lean Consumer Startups Build Brands That Last
Anyone can copy your product. What’s much harder to copy is the trust, value and loyalty a great brand earns. Simran Suri, Principal at Maveron, draws on Maveron’s consumer sentiment research and investment strategy to show how early-stage founders can build brand from day one by staying close to customers, showing up where discovery happens and making value feel tangible. You’ll leave with a framework for building a brand as a lean team, and a way to show investors that your brand drives retention and LTV.
The Next AI Opportunity: What Hasn't Been Built Yet?
AI has made it easier than ever to launch a startup, but where are the opportunities to build something genuinely new? Drawing on her experience at Nvidia and as a venture investor, Amulya Vishwanath explores the next wave of AI startups, from physical AI and robotics to emerging applications, and what founders need to understand about the technologies, markets and customer problems that could define the next generation of companies.
Enterprise Relationships
Building relationships with large enterprises can be one of the fastest ways for startups to accelerate growth, validate their product, and unlock new markets. But breaking through the noise, finding the right champions, and turning early conversations into lasting partnerships requires far more than a great product. In this session, founders will learn how to navigate the enterprise ecosystem and build strategic relationships that create enduring competitive advantage.
Fundraising Best Practices: Making Financing Rounds Smarter, Faster, and Founder-Friendly
Raising capital is one of the most critical, and often most chaotic, milestones for early-stage startups. But what if technology could make the process not just faster, but smarter? This roundtable explores how founders, investors, and legal teams can
leverage modern tools to streamline financing rounds, from due diligence and data rooms to planning, execution, and post-close tasks like issuing stock certificates.
Build Something We Don't Have a Word for Yet
Pitches that change industries rarely fit existing categories – and most investors will pass on them for exactly that reason. This talk explores why the most fundable startups are often the hardest ones to describe, and what that means for how you build and position yours. Founders will leave with a clearer sense of the difference between a market insight and a market-creating idea, and what it actually takes to get a pattern-matching investor to bet on something genuinely new – before the rest of the world has a name for it.
Your Pitch Has to Earn the Next Conversation
A great pitch isn’t about cramming your company into three minutes. It’s about making investors want the next conversation. Dave Balter, Venture Partner at True Ventures and longtime entrepreneur, will break down what makes a startup pitch land, where founders lose the room, and how to communicate what matters without overexplaining. Walk away knowing how to sharpen your story, command attention, and make every minute of your pitch count.
The Boston Founder Playbook
Silicon Valley gets the headlines, but Chase Garbarino has been quietly building category-defining companies from Boston for over a decade. As co-founder and CEO of HqO, he has raised $200 million from investors and scaled to 30+ countries without ever needing to change geographies. He’ll break down the real advantages and real disadvantages of building where the startup playbook wasn’t written, and what every founder outside a major hub should know.
Small but Mighty: How AI Lets Lean Teams Outship the Giants
With AI agents, a small team can now ship like one many times its size. But when shipping gets this cheap, the bottleneck moves: did what we shipped actually work, and what deserves to be built next? This roundtable, led by IFTTT founder and CEO Linden Tibbets, gets into the tactical reality of running a lean, AI-powered team: setting up agents you can trust without watching every step, catching work that shipped but quietly does nothing, and spotting where teams burn cycles on AI that goes nowhere. Walk away with a simple loop for small teams (ship, verify, read the result, and let the evidence pick what you build next) and a sharper sense of how to use your size as an advantage, not an excuse.
What Counts as Traction Before You Raise?
Founders often describe traction with a long list of activity: pilots, LOIs, waitlists, downloads, press, partnerships, and promising conversations. But which of those signals actually change an investor’s view of the company?
In this interactive roundtable, Jason Kraus, founder of Prepare 4 VC and an investor in more than 20 startups, will help founders distinguish encouraging activity from decision-changing evidence. Participants will pressure-test their own traction claims, examine how expectations change by stage and business model, and identify the customer or market proof they need before beginning a raise. Founders will leave with a clearer, more credible answer to the question: “What have you proven?
So You Think You Can Pitch?
Please join us for “So You Think You Can Pitch” where three promising early stage startups will have 4 minutes to wow a panel of judges, who will then provide feedback.
Closing Reception
You’ve shipped a lot of ideas this week. Now ship a toast. Join fellow founders for drinks, bites, and the kind of conversations that turn into partnerships, hires, and lifelong friendships.
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