TechCrunch Founder Summit Agenda
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November 4th
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.
Lynne O’Keefe, founder of Define Ventures and an early backer of Livongo, health tech’s largest exit at $18.5B, and HIMS, which reached a $14B market cap, brings new proprietary survey data on how payers, providers, and health systems are buying AI right now. Founders will leave with a simple framework for assessing healthcare as a market for their technology and where to start.
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.
Built for AI From Day One
Adding AI features is one thing. Building an AI-native company is something else entirely. Lior Div, co-founder and CEO of 7AI, will explore what changes when AI becomes the foundation of a startup rather than a product enhancement. From team structure and product development to operations and go-to-market strategy, this session examines what founders should rethink when building in the AI era.
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.
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!
The Enterprise AI Playbook: How to Close L’Oreal and Vodafone Before You Raise a Series A
Most founders chase product-market fit before landing enterprise clients. We did the opposite. This roundtable covers the exact motion for closing global enterprise accounts at pre-Series A: how to structure the first conversation with a Fortune 500 CMO; why agency partnerships accelerate enterprise sales; how to price with no brand recognition; and what zero organic churn means for your fundraising story. Attendees leave with a repeatable enterprise sales framework, an early-stage AI pricing model, and the three things that make a CMO say yes before legal sees the contract.
Building 10x Teams at Cogent
Cogent’s approach to building high-performing teams starts with a bet most companies hesitate to make: hire people with the ambition to build something of their own, then give them reasons to build here first. In this session, Cogent co-founder and CEO Vineet Edupuganti will share how the company attracts exceptional talent, earns trust early, and turns individual ambition into collective performance. Drawing on Cogent’s culture of transparency, tight feedback loops, and programs like Founder Academy, Vineet will explore what it takes to build a team that doesn’t just move fast, but keeps getting stronger over time.
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.
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.
From CentOS to Rocky Linux: Building Movements That Outlast You
Greg Kurtzer helped create CentOS, one of the world’s most widely used operating systems, then founded CIQ and launched Rocky Linux when Red Hat discontinued CentOS. In this session, he shares hard-won lessons from building open source movements and a startup from scratch: why founders must leave ego at the door, then navigate the transition from hiring versatile generalists early, then moving to a team of specialists as you scale. He explains the mistake he almost made by dismissing the value of culture and core values, and what it really takes to build something durable.
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.