Opening Remarks

by Brian Corcoran @brianc13

• 1,300 people attending this years conference
• Attendees and speakers from all over the world

Past the Initial Flywheel: What Companies Can Learn About Product Scaling

by Supriya Uchil

• From RentalCars.com
• International expansion - merely changing the language isn't usually the solution
• Focus on tailoring the product for individual customers
• Intent Testing - small tests you can learn about customers to develop a strategy for expanding into new markets
• Are you creating a company or a legacy? People like Jobs, Bezos and Musk take more risks to create a legacy

The Greatest Lies the Devil Ever Told to Startups

by John Peebles @johnjpeebles

• From Mallzee.com / Administrate
• Talk about a small world - Administrate is headquartered in Edinburgh but has an office in my former home of Bozeman, Montana.
• Proposed a platform for meeting with startups behind them in the process to share knowledge
• The greatest lies told to startups:
  • "I'm a snowflake" - every founder thinks it
  • "It won't be that hard"
  • "It's cool to start a startup" - not everyone should be doing startups
  • "Your friends and family will understand"
  • "You'll make lots of money" - not statistically true
  • "You company is more important than you" - you need time to yourself to set yourself up for long term success.
  • "This won't take long" - building great, sustainable businesses take about 10 years
  • "Your first startup will The One"
  • "Technology choices are what kill most tech startups" - tech is important but its not the reason you'll succeed or fail
  • "You don't need a community. Just focus on your company" - talk with others in the start-up journey
  • "Don't worry about matching your funding strategy to your business"
  • "You can wait on sales. Prolly don't even need it." - selling provides feedback, focus on it
  • "Your product is the most important thing" - your product is broader than what you sell
  • "Don't worry about the people stuff" - if you neglect the people-part of your startup you will fail. Build a culture people will want to work in. Hire an HR person about 50 hires sooner than you think you need to.
  • "Other startups are killing it. All the time." - Hockey sticks almost never happen. Every startup has a gap year, problems are seasonal.
  • "You need to be in Silicon Valley" - You can build a great startup from anywhere
  • "Your investors aren't part of your team"
  • "Stay away from B2B. It's boring." - B2C problems require lots of capital, and capital is hard to get. Easier to get B2B customers.
  • "Don't worry about your metrics" - understand your metrics because you'll be asked about them. At Administrate every member gets a packet each month with business trends.
  • "Don't worry about the quadrant of doom"
  • "You're finished if you don't succeed" - you will not fail in life if your startup fails

The Myth of the Hockey Stick: How Growth Actually Works

by Andy Young @andyy

• From 500 Startups, Quancast, Stripe
• Growth includes whatever drives value in our business - not necessarily revenue
• Not talking about "growth hacking" - its a buzzword, and most growth hacks are small, useful optimizations, but they won't make your business
• Started Selective Tweets - for posting select tweets to Facebook using the #fb. Scaled to 1.3 million users in 3 years.
• "How can users be constantly reminded of your product through using it?"
• Retention is the silent killer
• Growth engines - Paid, viral, sticky, user-generated content, B2B content

Why Focusing on UX Makes Business Sense

by Sitar Teli @sitar

• From Connect - investors in Citymapper, Typeform, Soldo, Charlie
• Every product has a user experience, and it will be the primary way users interact with your product
• Typeform (form creator) addresses the UI/UX hole in existing form creators. Better UX leads to:
  • higher completion rate - 13% vs 55%
  • higher completion rate generates to more users
  • people tweeting about how much they like using Typeform
  • engagement, brand, venue
  • and less churn, cost, customer complaints

Fireside Chat

with Qasar Younis @qasar and Mike Butcher @mikebutcher

• On living in the valley - everyone who gets there thinks it's too late. Even people who moved there in 1998 thought it was too late.
• Startups can be based anywhere, they don't necessarily need to be based in the valley. It might be harder, however. As an analogy - you can be an actor anywhere, but it will be easier in Hollywood.
• Startup teams should be localized to set the pace and goal. After a few years moving to a distributed team is an option.
• "If you want a great job - become a venture capitalist. You don't work that hard, nobody knows what they're doing, and the return is huge."

Fireside Chat

with Michael Pryor @michaelpryor and Mike Butcher @mikebutcher

• Pryor started Trello, which was recently acquired by Atlassian for $425M
• Trello received 2nd place at Techcrunch Disrupt. The first place winner never got traction.
• Initial goal was to create a real-world implementation of a task list - if one user moved a card on Trello it should move on all other user's view. 6 years ago this was pretty difficult.

Start-Up to Scale-Up: Getting the Support Your Business Needs

by Sherry Coutu @scoutu

• Very few startups survive and grow. Of 220k UK businesses started in 1998, 2.7% achieved at least 1 year of high growth by 2008.

Panel Discussion

with Adam Gross @adam_g, Sherry Coutu @scoutu and Rand Fishkin @randfish

• SEO Moz has about 20 remote workers out of about 170
• Heroku allows developers to be remote, PMs are on-site
• On mistakes they've made:
  • Getting too focused on external things and ignore the internal culture of your company
  • Even if you're interested in entrepreneurship it might not be wise to go straight into it. You'll save yourself a lot of pain getting a few years of experience.
  • There's no rulebook to startups - so don't feel you have to follow certain rules about the types of problems to solve, funding, etc.

On the Psychiatrist’s Couch: Founders vs. Funders

with Harry Briggs @H4ryB

• Startups take a serious toll on founders
• Reasons:
  • Everyone else is "killing it" - like Musk, Zuckerberg
  • You risk looking stupid
  • ...and having nothing to show for it
  • Friends don't really understand
• Funders face a different set of challenges
  • Biases in businesses, people, markets...
  • Near infinite opportunities
  • Limited time
  • Decision fatigue
  • Trying to raise the next fund
  • Constant fear of missing the next unicorn
  • For years you don't know if you're any good
• Perhaps founders and funders are more common than it seems

Fireside Chat

with Gareth Williams @gareth_o_ and Mike Butcher @mikebutcher

• Gareth is founder of Skyscanner, a travel search engine. Recently acquired for £1.4B
• Travel makes up for about 10% of the worlds GDP
• Gareth recommends taking a trip to southern China to see how they're using software to see what's next
• 1% of Chinese people can speak English, and even less English speakers speak Chinese, so there's not a lot of knowledge sharing happening
• Brexit is making it harder to attract talent, already. Skyscanner has offices in mainland Europe which helps
• "Tech is the new Wall Street" - tech companies are now seen as leaders, like banks were in the 80s
• Advice for founders: Read incessantly from many sources

Wrap-up

Great first day of sessions. My only complaint is the parallel tracks (Strategy and Product today) mean you can only see half the talks. There were several times I wanted to see both talks happening at the same time.