Afleveringen
-
Most startups die. It’s a painful, inevitable consequence of the exceptionally difficult task of finding an intense problem shared by many and solving it delightfully.
However, not all startup death is inevitable. In fact, a lot of it is caused by avoidable mistakes along the way.
Sometimes, failure can also be for the better. Failing fast in the face of impossible odds is better than failing slowly and excruciatingly because you didn’t let go.
Joining Builders’ Studio to prepare us against the 10 vital signs of a startup meeting its doom is Marta Krupinska, Head of Google for Startups UK. She will not only activate the inner survival mode in us but also tell us when we shouldn’t give up.
-
An adjective that always comes up when successful founders look back on their journeys is hard. The early days are littered with decisions you’ve never made before and that will stay with your company for years. Later on, you become responsible for a growing number of team members and customers. Through it all, you never seem to have enough time to judge thoughtfully, and always lack people with whom you can be candid. As a result, every founder’s journey will be littered with difficulty – hard decisions, wrong decisions, long hours, existential doubt, wrong hires and painful fires.
To share advice on how to cope with it all we have Ross Mason, who spent 12 years building Mulesoft, which eventually got acquired by Salesforce for €6.5B.
-
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
All companies grow, but startups are defined by growth. It means the process of being intentional about growing. It requires creating meaningful and predictable change while being able to ship fast and reiterate quickly.
Joining us to give a growth crash course from seed to public is Brian Ta, Product manager at Coinbase. Before Coinbase, he worked on Growth at Airbnb, Strava, and AngelList. Brian is also a regular speaker at YCombinator where he speaks about Growth to their newest batches.
-
While some startups are built globally and require no or very little geographical customization, many will have to intentionally open up every new city, country or region. This is no easy task. Expansion is capital-intensive, and often requires hiring and setting up independent teams in unfamiliar locations. Cultural nuances often mean that every location will require some customization of product, offering, messaging or operations. What’s more – locations aren’t born equal. A fantastic one can make a company, while many startups have burnt through their runway fighting an uphill battle in a difficult market.
To provide perspective on all of this is Clara Chappaz, Director at La French Tech.
-
One thing that doesn’t change as your company grows is that your people will remain your single biggest competitive advantage. While a single bad hire will no longer kill your company, an overall lapse in hiring quality almost definitely will.
At this point, you may be hiring dozens of people a month. Also, while you as a founder could once sit in on every single interview, you’ll struggle to do that now. So, how do you teach your organisation to find, convince and onboard fantastic people at an exceptional pace?
To shed light on this we are welcoming Shimona Mehta, who’s Managing Director, EMEA for the €46B icon that is Shopify.
-
Culture isn’t static, it constantly evolves as your company evolves and hires new people. Though all of that, the culture needs to be steered with intention so that it leans into the requirements of scale and great ideas that come along but stays anchored your values. You also constantly need to nurture and uphold the culture. After all, your values document doesn’t define your culture – the daily actions of every employee do. Joining us to share his insights on scaling culture at a fast-growing company is Niccolo Perra, Co-Founder at Pleo.
Niccolo has played an active role in defining the fintech giant’s values and turning them to into actions. He’ll provide a playbook for how to build a sustainable culture that grows with your company from 0 to 100 and beyond.
-
For long, security used to be a top-down market – sales people selling a product to large chunks of a company in one go. Since 2015, Snyk has been on a mission to upend this model. Individual developers adopt the product long before it rolled out across the company. This motion is supported by a freemium tier and a deep focus on the user, rather than the buyer.
Now, Snyk’s Co-founder and President Guy Podjarny will get on stage with Tom Hulme of GV to unpack what other B2B founders can learn from their go-to-market innovation.
-
From Facebook to Slack, Keith Adams has spent his life building and leading some of the most adored software on the planet. He suggests that, all too often, we view the quality of the software as something ineffable, subjective, and unmeasurable. Keith proposes a different approach – a unified metric for the quality of a product that spans performance, freedom from defects, and reliability. This way, companies can prioritize UX issues to fix and build better products, faster.
-
Many early-stage startups might consider closing deals as the most important customer interaction. However, delivering an exceptional customer experience is one of the most important things you can do early on. Nurturing your customer relationship is crucial especially when the majority of sales come from existing customers. This might sound self-evident as everyone claims to be customer-first, but are you truly?
Joining us to share 5 steps of building true customer love is Rebeca Tristan, Head of Customer & Employee Experience at Pigment.
-
Engineering, product & design form the core team that is needed to define and deliver fantastic products to the world. Out of these three, the product manager takes the main responsibility of making sure that the business goals are achieved. It involves defining the vision, discovering customer needs, planning the product roadmap, prioritizing product features and much more. However, many startups face the challenge of finding the most efficient and scalable practices for the role of the product manager and the whole EPD team.
In this talk, Steven Jacobs, who’s built hardware and software products alike at Apple, HP, Facebook and Google, will share the best practices for EPD teams and how to structure them. He will cover the practical methods related to OKRs, Product Roadmap Planning and Feature Request Process that are designed to scale with startups.
-
At some point, every startup needs to move beyond things that don’t scale and build a team that can intentionally and efficiently take its product to market. However, what kind of profiles should you be hiring first – and how should you onboard them? How should they be structured? What are the right goals and incentives to have in place? Who makes for a good GTM hire when both the market you operate in and the strategy for winning it may be blurry? Åsa Lidén, COO of next-gen presentation software Pitch will unpack it all.
-
Product-driven companies put their users’ painpoints and the extent to which their product solves those front and center. When necessary, they do so at the cost of short-term sales.
Product managers work at the core of these choices. After all, they are the ones that translate customer understanding into product roadmaps. Leigh Marie Braswell was the first product manager at Scale AI before turning to early-stage investing at Founders Fund. She will join us to share insights on how fantastic product management can uphold product-driven cultures as companies grow in scale and complexity.
-
At the inception, you will work side-by-side in a room with your co-founders every day. Each of you will understand every part of the business, and you can make most decision together. What a joy!
However, if everything goes well, this dynamic will look very different a few years down the line. Each of you will have real C-level roles at a real company. Someone needs to be CEO. You can no longer stay on top of every detail and decision in each other’s domains. How do you nurture trust and intimacy? How do help each other grow now that each of you is in over your heads?
To talk about all of this we have Yoko Sprig, Co-founder and CEO of the equity management platform Ledgy.
-
Organisations often talk about the importance of diverse perspectives but how can founders really ensure the broadest range of voices are heard? What steps can founders take to embed diversity in their organisations to build the best products and services for users?
In a fireside chat Danish business angel Louise Herping Ellegaard speaks to Esther Hare, Apple’s senior director of Worldwide Developer Marketing and Executive Sponsor Women@Apple, as they share their experiences as leaders in technology. From how you can support and elevate each other to how you can give a voice to those traditionally unrepresented, the session will give you an insight into what it really takes to build a truly inclusive organisation.
-
In the early days, a startup’s competitive edge is almost always agility, speed, and relentless passion for the problem. Founders tend to have an intimate knowledge of the customer pain and, early on, are able to project that understanding onto almost every detail in the company.
As companies scale and mature, they risk losing this and becoming the very behemoths they set out to disrupt. However, Qonto Co-founder and CEO Steve Anavi argues that it doesn’t have to be like this. He will join the stage to share insights on how to remain agile.
-
Fundamentally, a product proposition answers the question: why should someone buy this product? This is a question that any startup is going to have to answer very clearly before they can dream of product-market fit. So how do you narrow down from a rough idea to a specific product proposition?
Now, for many companies, the work doesn’t stop there. That was the case for Spotify, who’s Global Head of Consumer Experience Sten Garmark join us for this talk. After achieving exceptional success in music streaming, Spotify chose to start building product #2 – podcasts. Guided by Slush CPO Elmo Pakkanen, Sten will delve into why and how that happened.
-
We all know a good brand when we see one. However, the amount of established brands have forced nascent ones to go to increasing lengths to stand out and break through the noise.
Joining us to uncover what it takes to create brands that users connect with on an emotional level is Natasha Lytton, Head of Brand, Network & Portfolio at Seedcamp. Her talk will take us from the foundational moments all the way through to how your brand might need to evolve and expand as your product and user base do.
-
Everyone knows your story matters to you, but is it a compelling one that can break through the clutter? No matter how big the need is, how great your tech is, or how talented your team is, you will need to craft your own story. Joining us to fight for relevance and attention through startup storytelling is Gabe Kleinman, who works on Founder Solutions & Marketing at the purpose-focused VC fund Obvious Ventures.
After the keynote, you’ll walk out with a practical playbook on Startup Storytelling that covers questions related to purpose, journey, and truth, as well as target and message.
-
One of the most common misguided pieces of startup advice is: “go find a huge market and claim a small share of it”. However, very few iconic companies are built this way. Much more often, great startups create new categories that exist adjacent to, in the intersection of or totally outside of the existing market. These markets are often originally very small, or non-existent. However, when the time is right, companies are able to rapidly grow these spaces and turn them into huge ones in a matter of years.
To share advice on how to do this is Yee Lee, VP Growth & Capital Markets at Terraformation – a company attempting to reforest the Earth at an immense scale. It’s not Yee’s first rodes – he’s a two-times founder and has worked on product at Meta, Google, Skype, Slide and PayPal alike.
-
Throughout the whole life-cycle of your startup, it is very easy to lose sight of what is important - from the chaos of the early days, to managing successful teams later on.
In this talk, Marcelo Lebre, COO and co-founder of Remote, will share his experience on how to keep the focus on the things that really matter.
- Laat meer zien
