TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026: Roundtable Guide

The value is in the specificity

Short discussions get better when you bring context. "How do we sell to enterprises?" is broad. "We have a working product, but a prospect needs a security review and approvals from multiple teams - what should we validate before we invest in a bigger sales motion?" gives the group something concrete to respond to.

That doesn't mean you have to share confidential customer details or proprietary data. You can describe the shape of the decision without naming a client or revealing sensitive information. What you're aiming for is clarity: what you're trying to achieve, what's blocking it, and what constraints you can't ignore.

A useful way to evaluate advice

A suggestion from another founder is useful because it shows what worked in one specific context - not because it's automatically true for everyone. Before you adopt it, ask what conditions made it succeed. Were they selling to the same kind of buyer? At a similar stage? With comparable funding, product maturity, or regulatory exposure?

This matters a lot for topics like AI adoption and enterprise sales. A tactic that works for a well-funded company with a mature product can be too costly - or just too early - for a smaller team. Think of the roundtable as help for improving your decision-making, not as a replacement for what you're seeing from customers.

Building an events strategy before hiring a full-time team

10:45-11:15 a.m. | Roundtable 2

Alexandra Ames, founder and chief event strategist at Blueprint Lab, will lead a discussion on how to use events strategically before you can justify hiring a dedicated events person. The focus is on picking the right opportunities, defining what "success" means, and making limited resources do more.

This is especially relevant if events are already showing up in your sales, partnerships, or community activity - but you can't clearly measure the return. It's easy for a small company to confuse "a busy calendar" with an actual strategy. Before you commit time and budget, decide what you expect an event to produce: qualified conversations, customer insight, partner relationships, or something else you can evaluate afterward.

Bring one event decision you're facing - whether to sponsor, attend, speak, or host a smaller gathering. The right question isn't which option gets the most visibility. It's which option is most likely to lead to the outcome your team actually needs, given the time and money you have.

Choosing a first vertical when the hardest market has the most potential

11:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. | Roundtable 1

Chirag Shah, partner at Define Ventures, will discuss the challenge of entering a vertical with real potential but high barriers to access. The session is aimed at founders working in regulated industries, dealing with complex buyers, or serving specialized customers.

A vertical market can make a product easier to position because the customer has a recognizable set of problems - and product decisions can connect to a specific operating context. But getting into a complex vertical often requires domain expertise, a longer sales cycle, or extra work to meet customer requirements. The biggest theoretical opportunity doesn't automatically make it the right first market.

If you're considering a vertical bet, use the discussion to test your assumptions about access and adoption. Who feels the problem firsthand? Who controls the budget? What has to be true for a first customer to become a repeatable sales pattern? Those questions can separate a niche that's genuinely promising from one that looks attractive only on paper.

Using GraphRAG and knowledge graphs to address AI trust

11:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. | Roundtable 2

Shishir Tewari, head of enterprise data engineering at Procore Technologies, will look at how knowledge graphs and GraphRAG can give AI systems better context. The persistent enterprise AI question here is whether users can trust the system's outputs in real organizations.

For founders, this is bigger than picking an architecture. An AI product has to work with the right information, produce answers that are actually useful, and fit into the customer's real workflows. A knowledge graph can map relationships between entities, while GraphRAG combines graph-based context with retrieval-augmented generation. These approaches can help, but they don't remove the need to evaluate data quality, access controls, and failure cases.

This roundtable should be a good fit if your product depends on information spread across documents, systems, or organizational relationships. Bring a specific question about where the context breaks down. For example: are you struggling to find the right source, understand how records connect, or help users verify an answer? Naming the failure mode makes the technical discussion more grounded.

Winning large enterprise customers before Series A

1:15-1:45 p.m. | Roundtable 2

Merve Kitapci, managing partner and chief growth officer of ADIN.AI, will cover how early-stage companies can win major enterprise customers. The discussion focuses on long buying cycles, multiple stakeholders, and the credibility boost that comes with landing a significant customer.

Winning before Series A can be valuable, but it's rarely a shortcut. Enterprise buyers often require extensive evaluation, and a high-profile logo can also create delivery expectations that strain a small team's capacity. A logo only matters if the contract, implementation workload, and follow-on opportunity make sense for your business.

Use the session to pressure-test how you qualify opportunities and manage the buying process. Who owns the problem internally? Who can approve the purchase? What evidence does the customer want before committing? These questions help a small company spend limited sales time on opportunities that have a real path to a decision.

Explaining a product that does not fit an existing category

1:55-2:25 p.m. | Roundtable 2

Andy Tang, partner at Draper Associates, will lead "Build Something We Don't Have a Word for Yet," a conversation for founders building products that don't fit neatly into an established category. The focus is on explaining the product, selling it, and helping investors understand the opportunity when the market has no familiar language for it.

When there's no category yet, positioning gets harder because customers and investors can't easily compare you to something they already know. But creating terminology isn't enough. The product still has to connect to a problem people recognize - and a change they're willing to make. You should be able to explain what your product replaces, improves, or makes possible without forcing the listener to learn a whole new vocabulary first.

If that's your situation, bring the explanation you're using today. Ask where the conversation stalls: is it the problem, the product, the buyer, or the reason the timing matters? Feedback on that specific point will usually be more useful than a broad chat about branding.

Helping a small team outship larger competitors with AI

2:35-3:05 p.m. | Roundtable 1

Linden Tibbets, CEO and founder of IFTTT, will explore how AI can help smaller teams move faster and produce more without simply adding headcount. The discussion will cover hiring, efficiency, and how to structure an AI-enabled team.

The real question isn't whether AI can perform tasks. It's whether using it improves your workflow enough to justify the added tools, review time, and operational complexity. A small team can use AI to reduce repetitive work, but output still needs ownership and quality control. Automating a weak process just makes the wrong work happen faster.

If you're weighing a hire versus an AI-supported process, bring one specific workflow. Identify the bottleneck, the quality standard you need, and what an error would cost you. That gives you a way to compare options without treating "AI" like a blanket reason to avoid building capacity.

Prepare a one-minute problem statement

Before the event, write down four things:

• The situation: What's happening now?
• The decision: What are you trying to choose or change?
• The constraint: What limits your options - time, budget, access, expertise, or team capacity?
• The evidence: What have customers, users, or internal results already shown you?

Keep it tight. If the group understands the decision quickly, you'll spend more of the session comparing options - and less time rebuilding the background.

Ask for conditions, not just recommendations

When someone suggests a tactic, ask what made it work for them. A founder might recommend hiring a specialist, pursuing a particular buyer, or changing an AI architecture. The follow-up that matters is the assumptions behind the suggestion: company stage, customer access, budget realities, and technical requirements.

This helps you separate a principle you can reuse from a success that depended on one-off conditions. Then you can decide whether the idea deserves a small test, more research, or no action at all.

Leave with a next experiment

Don't judge the session by how many notes you collect. Leave with one action you can take after the event, what you expect to learn, and what result would change your mind. That might mean testing a customer message, reviewing a sales qualification step, or mapping where your AI system loses context.

The point isn't to walk away with a complete answer. It's to leave with an experiment that fits your constraints.