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Government and defense are relying more and more on commercial services, but startups face a real challenge entering this highly regulated and formal side of the industry. How can young, lean companies compete for contracts and attention with primes and more established organizations – and how can investors help?
Executive Director-Space Workforce for Tomorrow, Space Foundation
This open call pitch-off will present startups across robotics, autonomous systems, AI/ML, Vision Systems, Propulsion and Navigation on the Space Stage at Disrupt 2024. Five finalists will pitch to Aerospace judges and one winner will get access to expert lead feedback sessions with The Aerospace Corporation, government experts, and commercial space leadership.
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If you aren’t building the next foundation model AI company, raising a Series A today is likely harder than it has been in some time. So, to help founders building at the Seed-stage prepare for their first lettered-round, we’ve rounded up investors to explain what they – and their firms – are looking for in their next Series A deals.
As the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, Peter Beck is a familiar face to anyone in the space industry. But the company’s ambitions go far beyond its popular Electron launch vehicle: Beck believes that to thrive, perhaps even to survive, space companies will have to become fully integrated one-stop shops. Hear how Rocket Lab is pursuing this ambitious goal.
Founder & CEO, Rocket Lab
Join Justworks’ CEO, Mike Seckler, for a discussion on how to build and run a high-performing board of directors. For many founders, board meetings can feel like a massive suck of time, focus, and resources. What if your board gave you energy instead? As a founder, you have the opportunity to set a foundation and approach that leads to more productive board conversations that make you and your company better. Participants will leave this session with multiple ideas for building a high-performing board from Mike’s experience as a two-time founder, board member, and from his own journey at Justworks (early investor/board member to CEO).
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Learn how affiliate marketing has transformed into a gateway for novel advertising solutions and e-commerce technologies. We will discuss how this marketing channel is incredibly powerful, diverse, and a technology gateway for online brands to enhance their sales and marketing efforts.
Launch has already been reinvented over the last decade, but why stop there? Demand for space is growing as fast as launch cadences permit, but there is opportunity beyond making rockets and vehicles. Startups will likely define the future of launch-related software, automation, and operations, if these founders have anything to say about it.
President & CFO, Relativity Space
Fresh off a $1 billion funding round, Wiz has shot to fame as one of the fastest-growing, impactful cloud security startups ever. And one of the most sought after: earlier this year it rebuffed a $23 billion M&A offer from Google. Come hear its CEO talk about his journey as a founder and the challenges (and opportunities) ahead.
Co-Founder and CEO, Wiz
Every startup knows that they need to find product market fit. But once they do find true resonance between what they are offering and what there is demand for, how should a startup ensure that they do not lose the product-market fit that they have gained? Finding PMF is one thing; maintaining it is another.
Managing Director, Adverb
President of Product and Technology, Glean
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
Former Disney Channel star Brigit Mendler wants to transform one of the least sexy segments of the space industry: ground stations. In this fireside, we’ll learn more about how Northwood Space will build out a data highway between Earth and orbit.
What is big deal with standards like FHIR? Why should I care when I am trying so hard to build an innovative solution and look for early customers? What would investors think? Does it allow my competitors to copy my offering easily? These are important questions for the healthcare startups. InterSystems have been supporting global data standards for decades. We will share our experience to help you answer these questions and leverage the standards to your advantage, not just technically, but also sales and marketing.
Cislunar space – the region from Earth out to the Moon – is quickly becoming the next frontier for commercial space activity and a gateway for future space exploration. This panel will explore how the convergence of cutting-edge technology, innovative business models, and strategic partnerships is turning bold visions for the Moon – from space stations to sustainable lunar infrastructure – into reality. Industry leaders will discuss the opportunities and challenges of building a thriving lunar ecosystem and how the commercial sector is positioning itself at the heart of this new era of exploration.
Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado has lived the experience that every founder dreams of. He invented a new technology that radically altered the way computer networks are built and sold his startup for $1.26 billion when it was barely out of stealth (the second startup he sold). He’s since gone on to have an influential career as a VC at a16z, leading its infrastructure investment practice. He’s now sounding the alarm on AI regulation saying that startups, in particular, need to get involved.
Private investments in commercial space companies has exploded over the past few years, but investor appetite has been tempered more recently by higher interest rates, turbulent space stock performance and geopolitical uncertainties. In this talk, we’ll discuss the future of space tech investing, which areas are oversaturated or undervalued, and whether this year will be make-it-or-break-it for space startups.
Founders seldom have the luxury of entering a completely empty market, but what happens when the incumbents are unusually entrenched? What does it take to start a company in an industry dominated by big players and technologies that have barely changed in recent years? Hear from two founders and an investor about the trials of taking on multinational conglomerates while building hardware and preparing for scale.
Managing Partner, Planetary Health, RA Capital Management
In the crypto space, it’s time to scale. All signs point toward a period of growth with high market prices, a more favorable regulatory landscape and a large ecosystem of scaling solutions that work. So let’s talk with investors who have backed some of the most influential protocols, exchanges and decentralized apps. What’s the next big thing and what has been the biggest surprise in their investment portfolio?
Join legendary investor Vinod Khosla for an electrifying fireside chat on the future of AI. Khosla will share his perspective on the groundbreaking opportunities AI unlocks — along with the seismic disruptions it will unleash. Given Khosla’s penchant for straight talk and his proven ability over the years to see around corners, you won’t want to miss this conversation.
Base is a secure, low-cost and developer friendly Ethereum layer-2 blockchain. It is also Coinbase’s most ambitious bet on decentralization. It serves as the home for all of Coinbase’s on-chain products but anyone can also build decentralized apps on Base. Jesse Pollak is in charge of the ambitious Base project at Coinbase. He will tell us why Coinbase is moving outside of its comfort zone and betting on protocols.
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
While there have been a number of digital bank shutdowns in recent years, there are some players that are not only doing well, but thriving. Neobanks Dave and Varo Bank each have millions of customers, growing despite a challenging macroeconomic environment and an increasing number of competitors. What are these companies doing to help them grow during challenging times? And what should we expect from them in the future? We’ll talk to execs to find out.
Family offices have gotten increasingly active in investing in startups both directly and through their VC investors. But what are they looking for? While no two family offices are the same, this session will dig into family office investing trends and where they have been spending time in the startup ecosystem. We’ll also dive into what kind of risk these investors are looking to take on and what makes a startup a good fit for this category of backer.
Family Office Principal, Elle Family Office
CEO & Founder, Keebeck Wealth Management
After selling Postmates to Uber for $2.65 billion, Bastian Lehmann is back with Tiptop, a startup that wants to unlock the monetary value of things you already own. Tiptop is building an instant trade-in program that is available at checkout. Retailers can integrate Tiptop as a payment option and Tiptop handles everything from quotes to payouts and fraud prevention. After revolutionizing the modern delivery economy and the food industry, can Bastian Lehmann change how we buy (and sell) things?
Software is eating the world, and companies are hiring global talent more frequently than ever. They want to be able to hire talent in foreign countries and retain employees who want to move abroad. That’s why a new wave of global HR startups are helping companies hire people all around the world with local contracts. But can they replace local subsidiaries?
COO, Check
One fascinating trend these days is an area that has a number of names: national-interest startups, American Dynamism, New World. These startups are creating technologies in areas that are meant to be built, used, and create jobs in the country of origin, like the US. They cover everything from aerospace and critical infrastructure to government, manufacturing and national safety. This panel will dig into how far — and how fast — Silicon Valley can rebuild a nation’s foundations.
Managing Partner, Dcode Capital
Two of the industry’s most famous sisters sit down alongside business partner Phil Schwarz to talk about consumer investing, culture curation, and what it means to be a creator in the modern age.
The bankruptcy of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) fintech Synapse shows just how treacherous things are for the often-interdependent fintech world when one key player hits trouble. Synapse’s problems have hurt and taken down a number of other startups and affected millions of consumers all over the country. Many believe regulatory clarity is needed moving forward. One analyst says the case of Synapse underscores the need for fintech companies to maintain high operational and compliance standards. This panel looks at the potential impacts the Synapse collapse will have on the future of BaaS.
General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, Treasury Prime
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Schedule a 1:1 or group Braindate conversations by accessing the Braindate platform via our event app.
Startup work and venture capital investing are usually judged through the lens of their financial results. The bigger a startup gets, the more it’s worth. But some upstart tech companies are also working on making the world better, while making money. So we want to know how far the ‘doing good’ can go while not giving up on the critical ‘making money’ side of building tech companies.
Join Justworks’ CEO, Mike Seckler, for a discussion on how to build and run a high-performing board of directors. For many founders, board meetings can feel like a massive suck of time, focus, and resources. What if your board gave you energy instead? As a founder, you have the opportunity to set a foundation and approach that leads to more productive board conversations that make you and your company better. Participants will leave this session with multiple ideas for building a high-performing board from Mike’s experience as a two-time founder, board member, and from his own journey at Justworks (early investor/board member to CEO).
Cyberattacks are inevitable, but disasters are avoidable. Hear from experienced security defenders who have built and grown security teams, and what you need to know to get ahead of cyberattackers before they strike.
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
Everyone knows that it is stressful to build a company. And it’s just as commonly known that endless chronic work can lead to burnout. So, why don’t we talk more about founder mental health? Now that our culture is more comfortable discussing mental health in general, it’s time we brought the topic to Disrupt for a thorough interrogation.
Join us for a one on one chat with Slack CEO Denise Dresser, who became the company’s third CEO in 10 months and has had to lead her organization through a time of turbulence, while navigating being part of the Salesforce family and all that entails
Need to drive more brand awareness and traffic to your store? There’s an affiliate solution for that.
Want to convert more shoppers into buyers? There’s an affiliate solution for that.
Looking to encourage repeat business and referrals? There’s an affiliate solution for that.
Learn how affiliate marketing has transformed into a gateway for novel advertising solutions and e-commerce technologies. We will discuss how this marketing channel is incredibly powerful, diverse, and a technology gateway for online brands to enhance their sales and marketing efforts.
What is big deal with standards like FHIR? Why should I care when I am trying so hard to build an innovative solution and look for early customers? What would investors think? Does it allow my competitors to copy my offering easily? These are important questions for the healthcare startups. InterSystems have been supporting global data standards for decades. We will share our experience to help you answer these questions and leverage the standards to your advantage, not just technically, but also sales and marketing.
Gone are the days when recruiters seemed more plentiful than leaves in the wind; employees in nearly every startup function are therefore facing a more conservative labor market. How can founders capitalize on their increased labor buying power, while also treating their staff with respect and retaining key talent? Founders, take note, this one is for you.
Partner, People & Talent, SignalFire
Over her decade-long tenure, Chairman and CEO Mary Barra has pushed to transform General Motors into a technological powerhouse — and one that will lead in electrification, software and autonomous driving though their self-driving subsidiary Cruise. We’ll take stock of her progress — including the unexpected speed bumps along the way — and dig into her plans for the future, including where GM is investing capital.
Open source has become the default business model for many tech startups. But the success of the movement hasn’t been without challenges as businesses now try to balance the ideals of open source with the realities of running a business in an ever-changing competitive environment. Join us to hear industry leaders discuss how they navigate these complexities and what the future holds for open source as a sustainable business model
What’s the difference between true opportunity and hype? Answering that question correctly is the difference between success and failure and the tech industry. And it’s a far more difficult question than it might appear. When everyone is convinced a specific tech is the future, founders – and even VCs – tend to pursue that tech en mass. But as anyone who’s been through a Valley boom and bust cycle knows, collective excitement – hype – isn’t the best indicator.
SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR — few people want to deal with them, but to be even considered for a deal, many B2B startups now need to comply with one or more compliance frameworks. Vanta, which became a unicorn in 2022, has become somewhat of a standard of its own for helping businesses automate large parts of their initial and recurring audits. We’ll talk to Vanta CEO and co-founder Christina Cacioppo about what it has been like to build and scale a trust management startup, and how AI and other new technologies are shaping its future.
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
While a lot of celebrities invest in startups, the Chainsmokers are different. Instead of angel investing, Drew Taggart and Alex Pall launched a formal fund, Mantis Venture Capital, invest out of a formal closed-end fund, and back companies in industries their celebrity prowess can’t always help in, like security startups and analytics platforms. In this session, Taggart and Pall will be joined by Dan Lorenc, the founder of Chainguard, to talk about how they are an asset to their B2B startups.
Producer, The Chainsmokers & Partner and Co-Founder, MANTIS Venture Capital
Producer, The Chainsmokers & Partner and Co-Founder, MANTIS Venture Capital
Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who recently co-founded Sierra, a new startup building a customer experience AI agent, will join us to talk about why he thinks AI agents are going to transform enterprise software. We’ll also chat about what it’s like going from a big company like Salesforce to a brand new startup – and his life as a mover and shaker in Silicon Valley, including being board chair of several high-profile companies including Twitter and OpenAI.
Every startup begins with a founder with a germ of an idea. How does it mature into an actual business? Venture capitalists have to sort through pitches every day to find the gems that will become successful companies. We’ll speak to a trio of investors to find out what they look for in early stage companies.
This year, TechCrunch joined forces with StrictlyVC to create smaller, more intimate evenings for our readers. Already this year, we’ve hosted these nights in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and London. Now you can join us at TechCrunch Disrupt for a special StrictlyVC event, delivering exclusive, insider content while facilitating meaningful connections among leading investors, entrepreneurs and executives. Attendees can anticipate engaging discussions, thought-provoking insights and ample opportunities to forge new connections.
– Investor Pass required
General Partner, Top Tier Capital Partners
Producer, The Chainsmokers & Partner and Co-Founder, MANTIS Venture Capital
Producer, The Chainsmokers & Partner and Co-Founder, MANTIS Venture Capital
The rise of modern AI applications has but a renewed emphasis on the importance of the data that underpins them. But simply having data isn’t enough, you also need the tools to manage it, secure it and build the pipelines to let it flow between applications. In this session, we’ll talk to some of the companies that are building the tools to make that happen.
An articulate, alluring pitch presentation is a big part of successfully fundraising, and yet it’s relatively uncommon for founders to get candid feedback on how they communicated the problem, their solution, and their path to success. During the Pitch Deck Teardown, VCs will offer their live feedback on decks submitted by audience members.
Partner, Greycroft
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Schedule a 1:1 or group Braindate conversations by accessing the Braindate platform via our event app.
Old ideas like you need $100 million worth of trailing revenue to go public, and $1 million worth of annual recurring revenue to raise a Series A are so old that they are practically perched atop Abe Lincoln’s head. In today’s market, what a startup needs to raise depends on its sector, founder profile, and, yes, momentum. So what do you need to raise that Series A?
As generative AI tools become more widely available – and become cheaper, or even free, to use – they’re being abused by an array of actors, including state actors, to create deepfakes and sow disinformation online. In this session, we’ll hear from experts about the types of deepfakes now circulating the web and some possible ways to combat the threat.
Director, CITRIS Policy Lab; Host, TecHype; & Assoc. Research Professor, Goldman School, UC Berkeley
Rivian’s chief software officer Wassym Bensaid knows a thing or two about building a product from scratch in a high-stakes environment. The software and systems engineering veteran played a central role in Rivian’s recent push to drive down costs, while improving its EVs. It was a massive and existential effort that led the EV maker to rework the guts of the vehicles, including the electrical architecture and a redesigned software user interface. It wasn’t always easy. Bensaid, who has led R&D programs at Freescale and Intel and most recently held a senior engineering leadership position at Silver Spring Networks, has been in this spot before. Learn from Bensaid what it takes to build a product from scratch, including how to navigate conflict and challenges — an essential tool for any startup founder.
There’s a war brewing in the AI industry between the supporters of “open-source” AI models — models released under permissive licenses that can be fine-tuned and repurposed for a range of applications — and closed-source models, or models gated behind paid services and APIs. Is one approach better than the other? The answer isn’t as clear-cut as you might think.
CEO, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)
The grand final of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition. Watch the final 5 teams from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
Before generative AI took center stage, the burgeoning autonomous vehicle technology industry was where many machine learning and AI experts played. Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson , who has been in the thick of it for a decade, is now preparing the Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company for its next big adventure.
AI’s meteoric rise has created new ethical dilemmas and exacerbated old ones, while lawsuits drop left and right. This threatens both new and established AI companies, and the creators and workers whose labor feeds the models. A panel of experts in AI, copyright, and ethics take on this complex and fast-moving problem space.
Open-source software is everywhere, and in everything. Many startups are pursuing explicitly open-source business models. But every company out there that builds software has at least some dependency on open-source code. Recent security issues, however, have made it plain that open-source software is a target for state-level hackers. So, how can we keep building and using code that is built communally, but without the risk of backdoors and other security holes?
Section Chief, Open Source Security, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
General Counsel and Co-Founder, Tidelift
Generative AI is increasingly capable of creating video, music, and other media on demand. But who actually wants it, and why? This panel of AI startups will discuss the growing markets for generative media, and how they can be served without harming or displacing the artists they claim to empower.
Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine might be the next stage of interacting with the web and knowledge in general – or not. But the company is certainly risking it all to manifest that future, even if it ruffles a few feathers along the way. Hear from the CEO how the company plans to take on all comers in this new category of tech.
Startup founders are often presented with the chance to sell their companies before they reach full maturity. In today’s world with IPOs often delayed past historical norms, it may be tempting for founders to look for a parent company for their startups. But when does it make sense to sell, when should a founder keep blazing their own path?
Databricks was founded in 2013 and its original aim was to commercialize the open-source data analytics engine Apache Spark. Fast forward to 2024 and the company’s last funding round valued it at $43 billion. Few companies have managed to adjust to changing market needs as well as Databricks, including its current focus on AI. We’ll sit down with Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi to talk about how he sees the current data and AI landscape, and, of course, the company’s long road to an IPO.
AI development continues at a breakneck pace, but how fast is too fast? Is it coming at the expense of safety? In this fireside, U.S. AI Safety Institute director Elizabeth Kelly talks about the need to balance AI innovation with safeguards.
Director, U.S. AI Safety Institute, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Commerce
If anyone knows a thing or two about losing control of your own narrative, it’s Colin Keapernick. Now the former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist runs an AI storytelling platform, Lumi, to help creators tell and own their stories. We’ll chat about the media landscape, how AI can empower storytellers, and biases in today’s AI models.
Founder & CEO, Lumi and Super Bowl QB