Have Your Say: Vote for the Audience Choice Sessions at the TechCrunch Founder Summit!

Each year, TechCrunch receives an impressive number of applications from individuals eager to present at our events, and this year’s Founder Summit in Boston on November 4 is no different! We sincerely thank everyone who has applied to share their insights and expertise with the startup community.

After a detailed selection process, we have chosen 11 finalists who will vie for four slots on this year’s event agenda. Each finalist offers actionable and essential insights that can only be gleaned from those who have successfully built and refined their businesses.

You can vote for your favorite sessions via this link and help determine the final lineup. Voting will close on September 4. If you haven’t yet secured your Founder Summit tickets, what are you waiting for?

On November 4 in Boston, you’ll have the opportunity to learn directly from experts in intimate, exclusive sessions that can give you a competitive advantage or help you define your role in shaping the next wave of innovators. We still have discounts available on tickets, allowing you to save up to $100 right here!

Now, let’s take a moment to look at our Disrupt Audience Choice nominees. Don’t forget to cast your vote using this form—check them out and submit your choice!

Event Planning Strategies Before Investing in a Full-Time Events Team

Alexandra Ames: Founder and Chief Event Strategist, Blueprint Lab

Early-stage founders often approach events in one of two ways: either by accepting every opportunity or by avoiding them altogether due to perceived low ROI. Both strategies are far from ideal. Events can significantly enhance your audience and credibility even before you achieve product-market fit, but this requires a strategic approach to choosing which events deserve your time and financial investment. We will discuss how to navigate limited resources effectively, maximizing ROI from founder events like this one. Attendees will leave with frameworks for prioritizing event investments, tactics for demonstrating value without complicated tools, and when to pursue events versus when to hold back.

Creating a “Made in the USA” Hardware Company and Achieving Scale

Hannan Happi: CEO and Co-Founder, Exowatt

The renewed focus on domestic manufacturing has some perceiving hardware production in the U.S. as prohibitively expensive for scaling. This session discusses how founders can establish hardware businesses that render “Made in the USA” financially viable from the beginning. We will delve into supply chain strategies, cost structures, factory partnerships, and how positive policies such as the IRA and CHIPS Act influence the landscape. Attendees will gain a practical framework for determining when domestic manufacturing can provide a competitive advantage rather than just serving as a branding element.

Create Something Without a Defined Category

Andy Tang: Partner, Draper Associates

Innovative pitches that revolutionize industries often do not fit neatly into existing categories, causing many investors to miss out on potential opportunities. This talk explores why the most fundable startups are often the hardest to define and what that means for building and marketing your business. Founders will obtain a better grasp of the difference between market insights and market-creating ideas, as well as the essential elements needed to persuade pattern-matching investors to support genuinely novel concepts that have not yet been categorized.

Using GraphRAG: Eliminate Hallucinations with Knowledge Graphs

Shishir Tewar: Head of Enterprise Data Engineering, Procore Technologies

Are your disorganized data sources causing your LLMs to yield incorrect results? Traditional databases often miss the mark when bridging the semantic gap for AI. Discover how to create a production-ready GraphRAG pipeline that transforms chaotic data into actionable insights. Key takeaways will include building an offline pipeline that consolidates different datasets into “golden records,” transforming flat records into comprehensive Neo4j knowledge graphs, and implementing a secure local LLM (Ollama) for translating natural language into validated Cypher queries. Equip your AI with the foundational data architecture it needs!

The Enterprise AI Playbook: Securing Deals with L’Oreal and Vodafone Before Series A

Merve Kitapci: Managing Partner and CGO, ADIN.AI

Many founders focus on achieving product-market fit before courting enterprise clients. Our approach reversed that norm. This roundtable offers specific steps for securing global enterprise accounts prior to Series A funding: how to start conversations with a Fortune 500 CMO, the role of agency partnerships in expediting enterprise sales, effective pricing strategies for startups lacking brand recognition, and the impact of maintaining zero organic churn on your funding narrative. Attendees will depart with a replicable enterprise sales framework, an early-stage AI pricing model, and insights on what prompts a CMO to approve a deal even before legal review.

Lessons Learned from 20 Years of Bootstrapping an Open Source Business to $50M+

Peter Farkas: CEO, Percona

Building a successful open-source company without relying on venture capital is rare, and scaling it beyond $50 million in revenue is even more exceptional. This talk shares two decades of lessons gained from nurturing a commercial open-source enterprise from the ground up. We will cover product-market fit, monetizing open-source while keeping the core product free, creating distributed teams before remote work became the norm, and formulating a sustainable go-to-market strategy without external funding. Furthermore, we will discuss failures, tough lessons learned, and strategies for competing against well-funded rivals while remaining bootstrapped. Attendees will find practical methods for sustainable scaling.

Small Yet Mighty: Harnessing AI for Lean Teams to Outperform Giants

Linden Tibbets: CEO and Co-Founder, IFTTT

The landscape has shifted, and we’ve experienced this change firsthand. A small five-member team can now outdevelop, outsell, and navigate around organizations with 500 engineers. This roundtable explores the practical realities of managing a compact, AI-enabled team: identifying which tools genuinely warrant your investment, how to implement workflows that increase efficiency rather than complicate processes, and where teams frequently squander efforts on AI initiatives that lead to no results. Participants will learn how to evaluate their current toolset for efficiency gaps, which AI-driven growth strategies are currently successful, and how to leverage their smaller size as a strategic asset instead of a limitation.

The Demo Trap: Why Dazzling AI Doesn’t Always Translate to Real Companies

Jeff Mahler: Co-Founder and CTO, Ambi Robotics

Amidst the current AI boom, captivating demos may garner attention, funding, and initial enthusiasm, but they seldom demonstrate a viable business model. This session explores the gap between prototype effectiveness and practical application, examining why promising AI startups often fail before scaling. Founders and investors will learn to assess whether AI systems are truly ready for production, which operational and reliability metrics are most crucial, and how to create companies that rise above the hype to leave a lasting impact.

From CentOS to Rocky Linux: Cultivating Enduring Movements

Gregory Kurtzer: CEO and Founder, CIQ

Greg Kurtzer was instrumental in the development of CentOS, one of the most widely used operating systems worldwide, before founding CIQ and launching Rocky Linux after Red Hat discontinued CentOS. In this session, he shares invaluable lessons learned from building open-source movements and a startup from scratch: the importance of setting aside ego, the transition from hiring diverse generalists initially to assembling a specialized team as you scale. He reflects on moments when he underestimated the significance of culture and core values and what it genuinely takes to create something that endures.

Healthcare AI Companies That Will Truly Make a Difference

Vikram Chaudhery, PhD: CEO and Founder, Genoa Ventures

Numerous AI healthcare demonstrations appear compelling, yet produce minimal results. The companies set to have an impact by 2026 won’t necessarily be those with the most advanced models. Instead, they will be the ones that provide actionable insights to clinicians promptly, effectively changing how doctors interact with patients within clinical workflows. This roundtable will delve into the characteristics that separate viable healthcare AI from costly science fair displays, where effective systems deliver tangible value beyond basic assistants, common pitfalls founders encounter before their Series A, and the standards that anyone involved in funding, founding, or joining a healthcare AI organization should adhere to.

The Journey for Technical AI Founders: Entering YC, a16z Speedrun, and Securing Top-Tier VC Funding

George Bandarian: Founder and General Partner, Untapped Ventures

Leading technical founders in AI and robotics often encounter obstacles, not because of flaws in their products, but due to their inability to identify what primary investors are looking for. In this roundtable, early-stage technical founders will examine what top-tier investors like YC and a16z prioritize beyond the presentation: indicators of founder-market fit, the need for most technical founders to engage business partners sooner than they anticipated, effective strategies for positioning an autonomous economy company to attract lead investors, and the real fundraising journey before gaining traction.