Last week, I attended the Ascent Conference in the Sheraton Hotel New York at Times Square, which is a 2-day conference focused on bringing together senior leaders in the East Coast tech community to learn, collaborate, and build the relationships needed to spearhead meaningful change. The experience was awesome: there are close to 1,400 companies, 3,500 attendees, 300 startup exhibitors, and a host of founders/investors.
The conference is shaped around 4 verticals:
Startup Grad School that focuses on the most important parts of entrepreneurship: finances & accounting, legal, recruiting, raising capital, sales, etc.
VC & Investing that devotes to networking with investors & LPs and discusses topics related to investment strategy.
Growth & Marketing that features talks from the world’s brightest minds in marketing, sales, and overall business growth practices.
SaaSummit that covers Seas-Based content: from tactics to land the first 10 enterprise customers, to discussions on the biggest emerging opportunities in software services.
Each vertical is designed to provide attendees with a focused view on a certain aspect of the tech industry to help them get ahead. I took some detailed notes of the talks/panels that I attended and decided to use this post to share my major takeaways.
1 - CEOs at Work
David Siegel, CEO of Meetup, presented the keynote address around the theme that people are feeling increasingly isolated and lonely and how meeting in person can change everything. That is, so long as we put away our phones to eliminate distractions in our social engagements. The Meetup platform straddles professional and personal lives and now reaches an astounding 44M members with 330K groups, 84K events hosted each week in every country around the world – with the exceptions of Iraq and North Korea.
Siegel encouraged founders to talk to at least 50 people before they selected their co-founders and to apply “The Rule of 5” which stipulates that entrepreneurs have at least five meetings together before they pursue a business venture together. Moreover, the emphasis was on finding complementary skill sets rather than duplicating overlapping strengths.
He also shared his top 10 strategies to build a solid community:
Test the viability of the product or business
Find a biz partner/co-founder
Drive debate & disagreement
Recruiting
Training
Influencer marketing
Drive business acquisitions & leads towards revenue growth
Grow power users through word of mouth (one mouth can be worth 100-1000x)
The community can be leveraged to make smart, strategic decisions
Personal & professional growth are intertwined
A common theme across all successful entrepreneurs is how much reading they do. Siegel suggested reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Running Lean, The Lean Startup Book, How to Win Friends & Influence People among others. Naturally, he closed with the suggestion that people get out more, and join a meetup group.
Falon Fatemi, Founder and CEO of Node.io, gave a talk on the future of the tech industry within the scope of Artificial Intelligence. Her company creates a turnkey AI-as-a-service platform that enables organizations to put the power of prediction into their applications without spending years and millions on risky AI experiments. She has coined the concept of "Artificial Intuition” and is leading a team of top technologists including the Godfather of Search, Louis Monier (Alta Vista) to enable users of business applications to see into the future. In her talk, Falon emphasizes that adopting AI is time-consuming and cost-prohibitive, which requires strong domain expertise on the data and people who can see future trends. Given the rise of deep learning and its applications, new jobs will be created beyond our imagination.
Falon also sat in a fireside chat called “Prepare your organization for the future of the workforce” with Ian Bester (Brainstation) - in which she reiterated that the rate of AI adoption in Fortune 500 organizations is very slow and therefore innovation must come from the Enterprise. She discussed a big cultural barrier that might hinder this process - a lack of understanding/proficiency/comfort from leadership about Artificial Intelligence, which leads to fear and pointless politics. Her two pieces of advice for these organizations are: (1) only build in-house technology if that’s central to your core competencies, and (2) really understand the right tool for the right job.
Henry Blodget, Co-Founder and CEO of Business Insider, gave an inspiring talk - “We need to create better capitalism.” He debunked the shareholder capitalism myths with these statements:
Employees are people who create value for organizations.
A healthy ecosystem creates more jobs.
Only the top 10% owns 84% of the stocks.
You can pay your team as much as you can afford to pay them without going debt.
The problem is the loss of good-paying jobs.
Technology has been taking jobs over the last 200 years.
Stocks reflect a company’s actual value, not just profits.
In order to create better capitalism, organizations need to create value for the shareholders, the society, the customers, and the employees. He cited examples of Wall Street organizations like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that have recently focused on these initiatives.
Jager McConnell, CEO of Crunchbase, discussed the process of moving Crunchbase from a freemium model to a subscription model. If you are not familiar with Crunchbase, it is the leading platform used by millions of entrepreneurs and investors looking to discover innovative companies and the people behind them. Crunchbase has moved from the advertising-based model to a subscription-based business with the introduction of a prospecting software tool, which is sold to its clients. This tool can capture user traffic data to see how people’s sentiments towards certain companies change. Jager shared 2 pieces of advice on figuring out the pricing structure for this tool: (1) have a lower price compared to other competitors; and (2) always test with different customer groups.
Andy Yang, CEO of Indiegogo, talks about his company in a fireside chat - which is the platform for empowering people to unite around the innovative ideas that inspire them and together make those ideas come to life. Indiegogo funds campaigns that are entirely community-led and social-proof, which are largely composed of passion projects from the creatives and product validation campaigns from entrepreneurs. There is a strong focus on safety and trust, community guidelines, and terms of services. Andy shared the 3 emerging trends from evaluating thousands of campaigns on Indiegogo: conscious commerce, comic books, and mobility products such as scooters and electric bikes.
Alex Solomon, CTO and Co-Founder of PagerDuty, sat down in a fireside chat with Alyson Shontell, Editor-In-Chief of Business Insider to talk about the inflection points that defined his career. Alex started PagerDuty in 2009 as the founding CEO. He led the company through the first several stages of growth: inception, product-market fit, multiple rounds of fundraising, building out the core functions of the company, and expansion of the product vision. His story is truly an underdog one, as he was rejected by Y-Combinator 4 times before getting accepted. He attributed this success to PagerDuty’s product-market fit/growth traction as well as internal recommendations from other YC companies.
Alex talked about his transition from a pure software engineer, to a first-time manager in Engineering, to seasoned manager hiring executives in sales, product, and marketing. He shared his hardest moment as CEO, which was losing talented employees to PagerDuty’s competitors. He reasoned his decision to step down from the CEO role to a CTO position, which is because he spent too much time internally working on the product and not enough time talking to customers. As PagerDuty became a public company, there have been more hiring in finance and legal teams, as well as more investment in the internal training program. His advice for companies looking to go public is two-fold: (1) beware of the looming recession, and (2) focus on key performance metrics and cultural values.
2 - Diversity from the Venture Capital perspective
An all-female panel was a refreshing part of the Day 1 agenda. Spear-headed by Amy Sorrells (Oracle Startups), featuring Jennifer Neundorfer (Jane VC), Erika Jolly Brooks (springbot) and Kris Beck (Proformex), the dynamic team covered “The F Word.” More specifically, how females, including women in tech, are securing only 2% of venture capital money. They cited the beginning of the Wave of Women as a growing number of female execs are leaving big tech and starting their own companies or venture funds, lamenting the days from 30 years ago when women needed a male relative to co-sign contracts to start a business.
Today, there are more funds and more options than ever before for pre-seed monies. Micro-funds continue to be on-trend. Women are outpacing men in earning Bachelor Degrees and starting up companies faster than men. That said, diverse, mixed teams are known to perform better which should dissuade founders from forming a homogenous team. Startups don’t consider maternity and paternity policies until they’re confronted with the need to do so which highlighted the need for founders to do more. Similarly, women in their 30s and 40s are finding it challenging to secure investments with many citing the “pregnancy penalty” as the reason for being passed over. All were agreed that showcasing the long-term view gives investors the confidence they need to believe that you can operate your business at scale with good margins.
In another panel conversation on the VC stage, Elizabeth Edwards (H Venture Partners) led a conversation with Zavain Dar (Lux Capital), Sutian Dong (Female Founders Fund), and Laura Chau (Canaan Partners) on how to diversity VC portfolio. Considering that Lux Capital mainly invests in deep technology such as AI, robotics, medicine, Zavain emphasized on the need for their portfolio companies to have people coming from diverse backgrounds and experience. Sutian said that VCs are experts at pattern matching and look for founders with deep domain expertise in the space that they operate on. Laura stressed the fact that investors are sometimes caught up by the cognitive biases of their own experiences, thus missing out on female and minority entrepreneurs.
In the panel talk “How to leverage East Coast Startup Ecosystem,” Tejpaul Bhatia (Startup Program Lead at Google Cloud) and Brandon Greer (Corporate Development at HubSpot) discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the East Coast Startup Ecosystem. The strengths include the talent and capital density (investors and financial institutions), educational density (universities in Boston, New York, DC), and next-generation legacy. The weak spots include bad weather and the inability to play to East Coast’s strengths. Specifically, Tejpaul suggested East Coast entrepreneurs tap into the key industries in different markets such as finance, media/entertainment, retail... To the end of the chat, he shared the 6 types of partnerships that any startups should look into building: VCs, accelerators, co-working spaces, universities, founder communities, and corporates.
In the panel talk “Sectors, Markets, and VC Landscape in the developing regions” hosted by Rebecca Szkutak (VC Journal), Alex Lazarow (Cathay Innovation), Lylan Masterman (Whitestar Capital), and Banafsheh Fathieh (Naspers Ventures) shared their opinions on investment in other parts of the world. Some trends are global, such as scooters, ride-sharing, and super-apps; while some are regional (decentralized logistics in Southeast Asia and the cash-in cash-out network in Africa) because of the massive nuances and different regulations. Entrepreneurs across the world are reinventing the best practices of running startups - being global in the beginning and utilizing distributed teams with multiple HQs/remote employees. There is also a strong correlation between capital scarcity and founders’ creativity, as they must be hyper-efficient given such constraints. These founders master the art of bootstrapping: sustainability, resiliency, and survival.
3 - The Growth Masters
Alex Lieberman, Founder of Morning Brew, discussed how his team 10x Morning Brew’s subscriber base under a year. He talked about how he chose the email platform to appeal to college students who are interested in the business world, how he chose a co-founder with complementary skills, and how his teams stay incredibly focused. He shared his 4 theses about the media business:
Traditional business news does not engage the modern business leaders.
VC-backed media scares them and has proven unsuccessful.
Content creation is democratized, but brand trust is not commoditized.
General interest media is out, niche media is in.
He resorts the success of Morning Brew on 3 things: (1) Content - the voice and tone of the newsletter is curated for young professionals, (2) Growth - the various growth channels include cross promotion, PR write-ups in other outlets, campus ambassadors, referral program, (3) Sales - brand trust leads to audience growth, which converts to increase of revenue in sales.
Trei Brundrett of Vox Media and Kamaron Leach of Bloomberg, hosted a fireside chat focused on the growth potential of media despite the effect commoditization has had on the quality of journalism. Podcasting was highlighted as an exploding option. Brundett referenced the trend of media mergers which offers viewers greater content and advertisers more eyeballs. Vox was recognized as a unique media provider given its emphasis on developing novel technology to serve its audiences, partners, and clients. At this time, they can reach 99% of all Millennials. Furthermore, Brundett shared how his team at Vox built tools for the editorial teams that leverage outstanding storytelling.
Elizabeth Cain, OpenView Venture Partners, showcased how the end-user era is here citing numerous examples, including Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, of bottom-up explosive growth driven by viral word-of-mouth influence. Cain has seen this first hand with her newest crop of graduates whom all feel empowered to self-select, use and recommend software that enhances their work productivity. Cain also shared the 3 steps to own product-led growth: make the product appealing to the end-users, only set the price after providing the value, and invest in customer success.
Harris Beber (CMO of Vimeo) and Jennifer Reese (CMO of SeatGeek) talked about the strategy of moving from performance-based marketing to brand campaigns. They are both responsible for expanding the reach of the platform and scaling the community of people using Vimeo and SeatGeek. For SeatGeek, the conversation is how to move from search (SEO / SEM) to influencer marketing and audio/video campaigns. For Vimeo, the goal is to move from capturing intent to raising awareness. From a tactical standpoint, SeatGeek uses high-level tagline across channels, purchases media and evaluates marketing saturation KPIs, compared with historical performance, and utilized the data science team to do analysis/make predictions. Vimeo focuses on the actual impact and captures awareness by doing ad sequencing and ad retargeting.
Carl Tsukahara, Chief Marketing Officer of Optimizely, talked about his responsibilities for the company’s global marketing strategy and execution. Specifically, he shared his advice for executives on how to build an effective optimization strategy. Most brands are at an early stage of incorporating a testing and experimental culture into their business strategies; thus he suggested to start with a very small iteration of product A/B testing early. Furthermore, they should test with low-risk stakes to get enough statistical significance on certain aspects of the products. Finally, they need to figure out where they sit on the optimization maturity curve.
Conclusion
I had a ton of fun meeting up and learning from tech and business leaders during the Ascent conference. More importantly, the conference exposed me to many different aspects including marketing, sales, venture capital… that I am unfamiliar with. I look forward to sharing more of this type of content in future blog posts.