There isn’t a single manual to read or prompt to give an LLM that can equip you with the skills and knowledge to build a company. But on November 4, TechCrunch Founder Summit gives founders the next-best thing: A packed day at Boston’s SoWa Power Station, where investors and operators share how they’ve navigated crucial decisions.
The Founder Summit’s agenda is built around core questions every founder eventually has to answer about capital, leadership, and what they’re actually building toward. And each session is designed to build upon each other. Like your startup’s founding team, these sessions work together to drive outcomes.
This is a breakdown on how the full event agenda fits together, and what you can expect to learn by attending. Keep in mind that tickets are at their lowest price point before they increase on October 16, so this is the ideal moment to grab your seat. You can save $200 on both Investor and Founder passes up until that deadline.
For a limited time, you can also get a second ticket for 50% off, and for even larger groups, there are bundle discounts available to groups of four or more.
Capital: How you raise, and who you raise from
Fundraising advice often stops at “How do I get the term sheet?” This track goes further, because getting a yes is only half of the equation. The other half is making sure it’s the right yes.
Underscore partner Brian Devaney opens with a candid read on today’s fundraising climate, including what investors are actually screening for right now, how founders can differentiate in a crowded market, and the specific moments where founders give up leverage without realizing it.
That’s the part most founders obsess over — as well as who ends up on the cap table once the round closes. This is where Vineet Edupuganti, co-founder and CEO of Cogent Security, picks up the thread. After raising an $11 million round, he learned firsthand that not every check is equal. He’ll walk through how to actually evaluate investors and navigate those trade-offs before you sign, not after.
This all frames fundraising as a two-part decision. First, win the leverage in the room, then spend it wisely on the right partners. Founders who only solve the first part often find themselves fighting their own cap table later.
Leadership: When the job changes, so does the team you need
No founder stays the same kind of leader forever. After all, the skills that get a company to its initial customers rarely match what’s needed when its customer list expands and the employee count grows. This track tackles that shift from two angles: the founder’s evolution, and the decisions on employees that either support or sabotage it.
HubSpot co-founder and Sequoia partner Brian Halligan has experienced this arc many times, first by building through HubSpot’s own stages of growth and now by advising founders doing the same from the investor’s seat. He’ll unpack how the CEO job transforms at each stage, the leadership habits that stop working once a company outgrows them, and how to keep reinventing yourself without losing what made you effective in the first place.
But a founder’s evolution doesn’t happen in isolation — it’s constrained by who’s actually in the building. NEA partner Melissa Taunton brings the hiring half of that equation, breaking down how early team decisions quietly set the ceiling on a company’s culture, speed, and ability to execute long before anyone notices the cracks. The founders who scale smoothly, in her experience, are the ones who treat early hires as architecture decisions, not just headcount.
Building for the future: AI, market fit, and knowing a winner when you see one
This is the track where the agenda gets most forward-looking, and it’s really three questions in sequence: What are you building, do people actually want it, and will it be big enough to matter?
7AI co-founder and CEO Lior Div starts with the “what.” Adding AI features to an existing product is a tactical decision, and building a company where AI is the foundation from day one is a structural one, touching everything from team composition to how go-to-market actually works. He’ll explore what founders need to rethink when AI isn’t a feature, but the premise.
Next, Kent Bennett from Bessemer Venture Partners tackles the question, “Do people want it?” This is a necessary gut check right after a session on ambitious AI-native building: It’s easy to mistake early traction or investor enthusiasm for real product-market fit. He’ll unpack the signals that genuinely indicate fit and the metrics that mislead founders into scaling too early.
Finally, TDK Ventures investment director Tina Tosukhowong zooms out to the category level with an explanation of the firm’s “King of the Hill” framework, which is the discipline top investors use to judge whether a company isn’t just viable, but also positioned to define its entire category on economics, scalability, and timing. It’s the lens that explains why some well-built, well-funded products never break out, while others soar to success.
The priceless lessons from a founder who’s seen it all
It’s one thing to hear these ideas in the abstract. HqO co-founder and CEO Chase Garbarino closes the agenda as a working example of all three tracks at once. After all, he’s raised $200 million from the right investors, scaled a team across more than 30 countries, and built a category-defining company, all without ever relocating from Boston.
He’ll break down the real advantages and disadvantages of building outside a major hub, and what every founder outside Silicon Valley should know before assuming they need to be somewhere else.
The Summit doesn’t stop when the sessions end
The agenda is the backbone of Founder Summit, but the day is also built around forming connections that can kickstart a nascent venture or lead to a new investor. Roundtable discussions dig deeper into the Summit’s themes in smaller, more candid settings, where you can actively workshop with experienced startup community members. And the Braindate networking app pairs founders with investors and peers facing the same problems outlined in the agenda.
“Founder Summit Week” runs November 1-7, with Side Events happening across Boston for anyone who wants more than one day with the startup community.
