Many successful startups experience a particularly disturbing problem: that is, you’ve made big promises to the marketplace, but things aren’t working the way you know they could. Producing what you should be producing is more difficult than you expected. You and your teams are working far too hard. What’s causing these bottlenecks? It all boils down to one word: execution. You’re not executing up to your capabilities. In this workshop, execution-and-growth expert Karen Walker will show you strategies – including how to avoid “teamwork-as-usual” – so you can handle the transition and pump up your ability to scale.

It all starts with the team.

Get it right and there is no obstacle a founder can’t overcome. When the team is healthy, people show up at work with a smile and work relentlessly for the collective good. Get it wrong and you’ll wonder why the office is empty by 4 PM.

When your company is at its earliest stage, you’ll hire people you already know. But with a little success, adding talent more quickly forces you to recruit total strangers. But how to do that well?

Brady Forrest, Partner of Enjoy The Work, a startup advisory firm out of San Francisco representing such companies as WeWork, Tipalti and inDinero, has developed a proprietary framework for startup hiring and will deliver a fast paced, practical guide that any founder can implement. It’s called the 12 Rules To Not Screw Up Startup Hiring.

In this hands-on, practical, and very prescriptive workshop session, multi-exited serial entrepreneur Randy Smerik looks at how to take your company from an initial startup to a scale-ready organization. In the no-nonsense style for which he’s become a Startupfest favorite, Randy tackles the hard questions about when and how to take institutional funding beyond the seed stage.

Randy’s the street-smart champion behind dozens of startup founders, as well as massive exits of his own including iPivot (Intel) and Tarari (LSI.) His years of real-world experience in management, growth, and strategic M&A make this an unmissable session packed with concrete advice for participants.

Key take-aways include:
– How do you know when you are ready to take the leap to a Series A Round?
– Are you sure you have the right co-founders?
– What’s the best way to structure the company?
– How important is a business plan?
– How—or even if—do you take money at this stage?
– How mature should your product development and deployment be?
– How soon do you need to have real paying customers?
– What are the top reasons why all of this may not matter, given that failure is such a likely outcome?

Join Randy in this session and the previous sentence is less likely to be true.

We operate in markets that are insanely crowded, and struggle to reach customers that are completely overwhelmed with choices. Positioning has never been more important and yet most companies fail to strategically choose a market position for their products. In this talk, I am going to teach you how to recognize the common signs of weak positioning and what to do about it. I will walk you through a process for positioning around your strengths and how to strategically choose a market context that makes those strengths obvious to customers. Lastly I will show a series of examples of startup that unlocked rapid revenue growth through a strategic shift in positioning.

Great products originate from the vision of the founders, who have deeply studied their audience and can easily intuit their needs. As you audience grows, however, companies must keep existing users happy while not falling off the innovation curve for new users and investors. This is the job of Product Management, but it can be hard to know how to start and grow the team. From this talk, you’ll learn:
– How to tell your product story to employees, customers, and investors
– How to start or or grow your Product function, assess needs and hire into them
– How to scale process without slowing down and crushing productivity
– And what you can do about these things today!

When you first built your startup, you made lots of mistakes. You didn’t know enough about cap tables, option plans, the value of investors, pricing, technical debt, and plenty more. And that’s fine; in the early stages of a new business, speed and adaptivity matters most. But now, on the cusp of closing serious institutional funding, it’s time to pay up.

Your organization is going to change. From organizational chart to board makeup, from metrics and bonuses to tracking objectives, predictability starts to overtake possibility. In this interactive panel discussion, veteran board- and startup-executives talk candidly about how to structure companies as they go into scale-stage growth.