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 ...
Nov 29, 2022•27 min
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 ...
Nov 28, 2022•27 min
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....
Nov 27, 2022•26 min
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 ...
Nov 26, 2022•28 min
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...
Nov 25, 2022•29 min
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...
Nov 24, 2022•26 min
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 lear...
Nov 23, 2022•27 min
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.
Nov 22, 2022•26 min
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 ...
Nov 21, 2022•21 min
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 pro...
Nov 20, 2022•27 min
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 softwar...
Nov 19, 2022•28 min
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 pro...
Nov 18, 2022•27 min
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 intima...
Nov 17, 2022•20 min
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 techno...
Nov 16, 2022•25 min
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 s...
Nov 15, 2022•27 min
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 mus...
Nov 14, 2022•26 min
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...
Nov 13, 2022•27 min
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 Storytel...
Nov 11, 2022•26 min
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 matte...
Nov 10, 2022•22 min
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.
Nov 09, 2022•19 min
At some point, every startup will have to charge someone something for using their product. The problem? Price is a topic that’s notoriously hard to ask your users for input on. Whatever model and price you settle on tend to be sticky, whereas your product will expand and evolve over time. What’s more, companies coming out of free beta often lose more than 90% of their users when they introduce a price, which can feel very scary. Joining us to share the fundamentals of pricing and monetization i...
Nov 08, 2022•27 min
In a startup, there are only so many things you can figure out sitting by your desk. Often, you’ll eventually learn that the list was actually far shorter than you initially assumed. Therefore, before you have users, you should spend a lot of time talking to people who could potentially become ones. However, especially in B2C, it might be hard to find people who are willing to spend this much time with you, and even more difficult to get them to give actionable direction on what to build. Who sh...
Nov 07, 2022•24 min
Mikael Thuneberg’s journey to building marketing analytics company Supermetrics into what it is today was anything but linear. In fact, between 2010–16 Mikael worked on the company alone. At the time, he may not have known that he was laying the groundwork for a big tech company. However, Mikael was taking a core company-building lesson to the extreme – building a brilliant product and doing very little else. This approach has stayed with the company – Supermetrics hired their first sales person...
Nov 06, 2022•22 min
In the early days, great products are almost always very easy to understand. This is the source of the common adage: you should be able to explain what you do in one sentence. However, simplicity isn’t always easy to reach. What if you know how your product will deliver value when it’s got a number of features and thousands of users, but struggle to see what Act 1 will get you there? What if your customers don’t understand your product and are giving negative feedback? Joining us to unpack these...
Nov 05, 2022•26 min
The first 365 days for a founder are full of excitement, uncertainty and hard work. At the same time, any great founder will quickly have to get comfortable saying no. In the early days, very few things make all the difference. Paraphrasing Y Combinator: you should build, exercise and sleep – and do very little else. So, what are the things to do and get good at? Which ones should you ignore? Joining us to share the radical prioritisation tips for the first year of founding your company is Rache...
Nov 04, 2022•28 min
In the early days your team will be the most valuable asset you have, and making the right decisions when hiring is imperative to your success. In fact, a single bad early hire will often kill a company. So, which roles should you prioritise? When do you set up your people function, sales and marketing? Which teams should you begin to scale first, and what is a good balance between them? Joining us to answer these questions and more is Tamás Kádár, Co-founder and CEO at SEON.
Nov 03, 2022•28 min
At some point, it was very fashionable to claim that startup ideas don’t matter. However, this is almost certainly bad advice. Very few legendary companies go through significant pivots. So, how do you come up with your own billion-dollar idea? Can you force yourself to do so, or should you wait to come across a sufficiently big pain point? Which factors separate great ideas from mediocre ones? How many of those can you actually research, and what can you only figure out by putting an MVP out in...
Nov 02, 2022•28 min
A startup’s first fundraise can be a daunting process. First, you have to figure out who to raise from and how much. Angels or VCs? How many of each? Second, you have to break through the noise, land a meeting, and convince investors of your vision. Third, you need to figure out what a fair valuation is and how much equity you’re willing to give away. Last, you have to accept that you might well be working closely with these investors for a decade if your company succeeds. Joining us to make sen...
Nov 02, 2022•24 min
Building a founding team is one of those foundational processes that every company has to go through. Famously, a successful founding team will outlast the average marriage, and any startups’ single biggest predictor of success is its early people, so who you found with matters. So, which things are non-negotiable in the best founding teams? Which skillsets are a must among the founders? How do you find and evaluate people if you don’t have friends with those skills? To unpack all of this, Slush...
Oct 31, 2022•28 min
Exits are a famously glorified part of a startup's journey. Whether it be through acquisition, IPO or anything in-between, a startup's life inevitably takes an intense turn upon exit. While we are ending the series with exit, this is ideally the phase in which the startups journey truly starts to grow. Joining us to unravel exits is Jan Rezab, Founder and CEO of Time is Ltd. Having built and exited Socialbakers, Jan will be finishing off the Builders' Studio series with a dissection on an ...
Jan 30, 2022•25 min
