You can learn a lot from a great founder session. But sometimes the conversation that changes what you do next happens five minutes after it ends. And with the event happening tomorrow, there is another reason to make sure you are in the room: the format is designed to help founders learn in different ways throughout the day.
On November 4, TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 brings founders and investors together at SoWa Power Station in Boston for one day of practical learning, candid conversations, live pitching, smaller roundtables, and networking.
Register now to save up to $100 on your pass, plus get a second for free. Or save up to 30% on group bundles.
All-day founder bootcamp
Start with the Build Stage: practical lessons for building what comes next
The Build Stage focuses on the decisions founders make while they are still shaping, testing, and growing the business. These sessions get into the mechanics behind building a company, from distribution and fundraising to team building and pitching.
Hunter Worland of NEA opens the conversation on why distribution can become a startup’s next competitive advantage, especially when strong technology alone is not enough to win customers.
Kristen Craft of Fidelity Private Shares brings a current view of fundraising trends, helping founders understand how the capital environment is shifting and what that means for the way they approach their next raise.
The stage also gets tactical about building high-performing teams and sharpening the story you tell investors, customers, and potential hires.
Dave Balter of True Ventures and Edisyl takes on a deceptively simple question: Does your pitch earn the next conversation?
The value of the Build Stage is straightforward: these are lessons founders can take back to their companies immediately.
Use the Impact Stage to think about what happens after something starts working
If the Build Stage is about creating momentum, the Impact Stage is about what happens once that momentum becomes real. This is where founders can step back and think about bigger decisions around product-market fit, scaling, enterprise relationships, leadership, and long-term growth.
Steve Fredette, president, co-founder, and director of Toast, brings the perspective of building and scaling one of Boston’s most recognizable startup success stories.
Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, explores the tension every founder eventually faces: when to scale and when hitting the brakes may actually protect the business.
Kent Bennett of Bessemer Venture Partners tackles product-market fit before scale, helping founders think more critically about whether the signals they are seeing truly justify the next phase of growth.
Chase Garbarino, CEO and co-founder of HqO, brings the conversation home with the Boston Founder Playbook and a perspective on building ambitious companies outside the Bay Area.
The Impact Stage is valuable because it creates space for founders to get out of the weeds for a moment and ask whether they are scaling the right things, in the right way, at the right time.
Go deeper in the roundtables
Main-stage sessions can give you perspective. Roundtables give you room to get specific.
Founder Summit’s smaller roundtables are built around highly focused problems that many founders are actively solving right now, from entering difficult verticals and building enterprise trust to creating lean teams and opening doors with major customers.
Chirag Shah of Define Ventures digs into what happens when your first vertical is also one of the hardest to enter.
A technical session with Shishir Tewari of Procore Technologies moves the AI conversation from broad hype to the practical challenge of reducing hallucinations with better enterprise context.
Merve Kitapci of ADIN.AI gets highly specific about enterprise selling and what it takes to land major global customers before Series A.
Andy Tang of Draper Associates opens a different kind of founder conversation: what if you are building something the market does not even have a name for yet?
Linden Tibbets of IFTTT explores how AI may change the assumptions founders make about team size, productivity, and what a smaller company can realistically accomplish.
The value here is participation. Instead of simply hearing how someone else approached a problem, founders can bring their own questions, compare experiences with the people around the table, and leave with ideas that are much closer to their actual business.
Watch the startup pitch advice get tested live
Founder Summit also gives attendees the chance to see what happens when founders put their stories in front of investors in real time.
During So You Think You Can Pitch?, founders make their cases in front of investors, including Dave Balter, Chirag Shah, and Simran Suri of Maveron.
This is one of the most interactive parts of the day because it turns advice about pitching into something founders can actually watch: what gets an investor’s attention, where a story loses momentum, and which questions come up immediately.
For anyone preparing to raise, sell, recruit, or simply explain their company more clearly, seeing those reactions live can be incredibly useful.
Spark meaningful connections with Braindate networking
The Networking Lounge powered by Braindate gives attendees another way to connect intentionally throughout the day.
Schedule a one-on-one conversation. Join a small group. Find someone who wants to talk about the exact challenge you are working through.
Hear a session on product-market fit, then find another founder working through the same issue. Watch the pitch competition, then compare notes with someone preparing for their own fundraise. Hear the Boston Founder Playbook, then meet other founders doing exactly that. Braindate helps turn the content into conversation.
Keep it going at the closing reception
The day wraps up with a closing reception presented by Fidelity Private Shares, giving attendees time to keep the conversations going without rushing to the next session.
That matters because some of the most useful connections at an event happen after you have already shared a room, a question, or a conversation earlier in the day.
One day, several ways to learn
Founder Summit is not built around one type of conference experience. The Build Stage gives founders practical lessons they can apply now. The Impact Stage creates room for bigger growth and leadership decisions. The roundtables let you ask questions and go deeper. The live pitch competition puts founder storytelling to the test. Braindate makes networking intentional. And the reception gives those conversations somewhere to continue. That mix is what makes the day valuable.
Bring a partner and cover more ground
TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 takes place November 4 at SoWa Power Station in Boston. There is still time to join us in Boston. Current Founder Summit passes include breakout sessions, roundtables, Braindate networking, the Expo Hall, and access to session materials after the event.
Even better, buy one pass now, and you can get a second pass free. Bring your co-founder. Bring a partner. Bring the person you will be texting session takeaways to all day anyway. Get your pass, bring someone with you for free, and join the founder community in Boston.
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