TechCrunch Founder Summit will take place on November 4 at SoWa Power Station in Boston. The one-day event will offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to speak directly with investors and founders about securing funding, hiring, AI strategy and category leadership. The sessions on the program are as follows:
- Underscore partner Brian Devaney will explain what investors are looking for today, how founders can stand out in a highly competitive environment, and how to preserve negotiating leverage throughout the funding process, from initial checks to term sheets.
- HubSpot co-founder and Sequoia partner Brian Halligan will discuss how founders can develop as CEOs as their companies grow, avoid leadership mistakes and build companies for the long term.
- 7AI co-founder and CEO Lior Div will examine how team structure, product development, operations and go-to-market strategy change when AI is not merely a product feature but the foundation of the company.
- Cogent Security co-founder and CEO Vineet Edupuganti will share his experience choosing the right investors, evaluating trade-offs and not focusing solely on company valuation after raising $11 million in funding.
- TDK Ventures investment director Tina Tosukhowong will present the “King of the Hill” framework, which evaluates companies based on their economic structure, scalability and commercial timing, through examples of fission and fusion.
- NEA partner Melissa Taunton will explain the impact of early hires on company culture and speed of execution, how to identify the right candidates and how to avoid common hiring mistakes.
- HqO co-founder and CEO Chase Garbarino will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of building a company in Boston. Garbarino will share the experience of HqO, which has raised $200 million in funding and is expanding across 30+ countries.
- Bessemer Venture Partners partner Kent Bennett will examine how to validate product-market fit, develop an MVP that answers the right questions and the risks of scaling before the fundamentals are in place.
Participants will also be able to network with founders at similar stages and investors who have previously gone through funding or hiring processes. The event tickets offer the lowest prices.
Why it matters
The program shows that entrepreneurship is not limited to seeking investment; leadership, team building, product-market fit and go-to-market decisions also determine a company’s direction. For this reason, the event is particularly significant for early-stage founders in terms of assessing together the relationship between securing capital and building operational capacity. It also raises the point that team structure, product development and scaling priorities may not be the same for AI-based companies and other ventures. Establishing connections with founders at similar stages and investors who have experienced these processes may provide an opportunity to see how the frameworks discussed in the sessions translate into practice. However, it remains unclear to what extent these approaches can be applied to companies in different sectors and at different sizes.
Background
TechCrunch is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 22 stories mentioning this name in the past 90 days; the latest is dated September 25, 2026.