Startups

Here’s a peek at what’s happening on day one at Disrupt

Comment

Welcome to the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt! Yeah, baby, we are ready to jump right into a jam-packed day dedicated to the growth and success of the entire early-stage startup ecosystem. Check out our day-one highlights to whet your appetite and then dig in!

Latecomers always welcome: Buy a pass right here.

You’ll find all the day’s programs, stage location and times listed in the Disrupt agenda and in the event app.

Expo Hall & Demo Booths

Head to the expo hall each day to check out early-stage Startup Battlefield 200 exhibitors and sponsor booths.

Investor Reception
Receptions | 12:00 pm 

Meet and network with fellow investors attending TechCrunch Disrupt at this Investor Luncheon OPEN TO INVESTOR TICKET TYPES ONLY.

Live on Stage: TechCrunch’s Equity
TC Plus Stage | 9:05 am

Start your day off right — join Mary Ann Azevedo, Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm at the TechCrunch+ stage for a live recording of Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. They’ll unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines and will wade through the hype to keep you up-to-date on the world of business, tech and VC. Come for the news and analysis, stay for the jokes — and for breakfast!

Winning the War on Ransomware
TC Plus Stage | 11:30 am

Ransomware attacks are escalating at an alarming rate. We’ll hear from experts about what winning the war on ransomware looks like and how startups can play their part — with Brett Callow, threat analyst at Emsisoft, and Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security.

How to Secure Those Hard to Find Hires
TC Plus Stage | 10:50 am

Hiring is not easy, even in the best of times. With a tight tech talent market and an increasingly remote-friendly — and therefore globally competitive — corporate landscape, founders have never had more places to hire from and more competitors to measure up against. So we’re going to talk with Chris Herd (Firstbase), an advocate for remote work, and Emil Yeargin, VP of talent at Gusto, which is not only hiring but also helps other companies manage their staff. And we’ll hear from Janine O’Neill (Sequoia), who knows a thing or two about hiring for startups. We’ll go deep on hiring with a special focus on hard-to-fill roles.

Framing Innovation Through Collaborations Big and Small with AT&T
TC Plus Stage | 2:10 PM
Connectivity isn’t a nice-to-have for innovation. It’s mandatory, and collaboration between AT&T and startups at all stages could push the world forward and provide the framework for innovation. Join this session with AT&T CTO Jeremy Legg and a special guest panelist as they discuss the key elements your startup needs to drive tomorrow’s next connectivity innovation breakthrough.

Marc’s Lore
Disrupt Stage | 10:00 am

Billionaire Marc Lore sold his startup to an everything store, twice. After inking deals with Amazon and Walmart, the Quidsi and Jet.com co-founder has launched Wonder to tackle a common problem — food delivery — in an unconventional way. Get ready for a delicious conversation.

Bankrolling the Blockchain with a16z Crypto
Disrupt Stage | 10:25 am

Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is the largest and one of the best-known funding sources for web3 startups. Alongside a16z founder Marc Andreessen, general partner Chris Dixon has been integral to the firm’s rise as a giant in the crypto VC world — he was an early investor in startups, including Coinbase, Uniswap and Oculus VR. Hear from Dixon about how a16z crypto is putting its massive $7.6 billion pool of capital to work by backing early-stage web3 companies.

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield presented by Capital Connect by J.P. Morgan
Disrupt Stage | 10:50 am & 2:30 pm

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.Live 

Making Care Actually Work
Disrupt Stage | 1:40 pm

Cityblock Health has experienced considerable growth on the back of a care model designed to actually meet the recipients of care where they already are — while still satisfying the needs of payers. It appears to be true accessibility in a framework that works with the existing U.S. healthcare infrastructure, but we’ll hear from CEO Toyin Ajayi about the work that remains to be done.

Breaking Into the Healthcare Monolith: Strategies for working with Payors and Providers with InterSystems
Roundtable | 10:30 am 

How do you build a health-tech startup that can achieve high growth? What can startups do to make their technologies more compelling to the biggest players in healthcare: payors and health systems? In this session we will discuss the pain points of getting into healthcare, as well as strategies to open doors to these organizations for pilots and sustainable revenue. You’ll leave this round table discussion with a list of best practices from InterSystems’ 40+ years in the healthcare industry.

Design and Scale Using Behavioral Science
Roundtable | 11:00 am

We are building technology for the future but have forgotten that our users still rely on a brain that hasn’t changed in 40,000 years. To design and scale successful products, learn how to leverage the power of behavioral science, and cater to the ancient decision-maker inside all of us — with Shirin Oreizy, founder and CEO, Next Step.

The CPO-to-CEO Pipeline with Egon Zehnder
Roundtable | 11:00 am

The product function has never been as important as it is today. As we see it continuously evolve and expand in importance, are product leaders poised to develop into the next generation of CEOs? Join a discussion with advisors who offer their expertise in evaluating future CEOs, hearing how other product leaders have made this transition. Additionally, compare notes with others on what this trend, along with the expanding mandate of the product role, could mean for the function.

Why nine out of ten startups fail with Mayfield
Roundtable | 1:00 pm

Two-time entrepreneur Dheeraj Pandey (former co-founder and CEO of Nutanix and current CEO and co-founder of DevRev) will talk about what he learned from founding a company and taking it to a successful IPO, plus the top reasons why startups fail. He will also share his framework around strategy for founders to attain Product Market Fit (PMF).
How to Supercharge Growth, Utilize Cloud, and Reduce Burn with Google Cloud
Breakout Session | 10:00 am

Building and running a startup has become even more daunting and challenging. How can you build fast while also managing your burn in the current investment landscape? Come hear from successful startups as they discuss: – Personal stories and battle scars in the journey to accelerate scale – Managing volatility and the unknown in a changing investment landscape – The importance of metrics and being smart about how and where you build – Solutions for Bootstrap, Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A startups and how you can get support and scale up.
What Happens When We Don’t Have Diverse Voices in the Room to Help Shape the Future? with J.P. Morgan
Breakout Session | 11:00 am

Wemimo Abbey, the diverse co-founder behind Esusu, shares the Inspirational story behind his innovative startup and the challenges he and his co-founder faced along the way. As minorities, they encountered unique challenges, and with the help of J.P. Morgan, the founders overcame them to ultimately reach their goals. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion isn’t just a check in the box, why is it so important? In this session we will discuss the benefits of including minority voices in startups and how to ensure DEI.

That should get your motor running. Now, shift into overdrive and go learn, connect and discover new opportunities to help your business grow! Remember, latecomers can grab a pass and join the fun.

How to Evolve Your Business Through Recurring Revenue with Chargebee
Breakout Session | 1:00 pm

With subscription offerings coming to nearly every vertical from fast food to car manufacturing, it’s clear that subscriptions are more than fad; they’re an evolutionary step every business should consider. Employing an innovative recurring revenue model offers a differentiated customer experience and revenue predictability, thereby increasing business resiliency, which is especially important in uncertain times. Regardless of where you are on your company’s journey, from a startup seeking financing to a late-stage business seeking valuation, your revenue model should be an important part of any business strategy.

More TechCrunch

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

The next few weeks could be pivotal for Worldcoin, the controversial eyeball-scanning crypto venture co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose operations remain almost entirely shuttered in the European Union following…

Worldcoin faces pivotal EU privacy decision within weeks

It’s unusual for three major AI providers to all be down at the same time, which could signal a broader infrastructure issues or internet-scale problem.

AI apocalypse? ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity all went down at the same time

OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT has been down for several users across the globe for the last few hours.

OpenAI fixes the issue that caused ChatGPT outage for several hours

True Fit, the AI-powered size-and-fit personalization tool, has offered its size recommendation solution to thousands of retailers for nearly 20 years. Now, the company is venturing into the generative AI…

True Fit leverages generative AI to help online shoppers find clothes that fit

Audio streaming service TuneIn is teaming up with Discord to bring free live radio to the platform. This is TuneIn’s first collaboration with a social platform and one that is…

Discord and TuneIn partner to bring live radio to the social platform

The early victors in the AI gold rush are selling the picks and shovels needed to develop and apply artificial intelligence. Just take a look at data-labeling startup Scale AI…

Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang is coming to Disrupt 2024

Try to imagine the number of parts that go into making a rocket engine. Now imagine requesting and comparing quotes for each of those parts, getting approvals to purchase the…

Engineer brothers found Forge to modernize hardware procurement

Raspberry Pi has released a $70 AI extension kit with a neural network inference accelerator that can be used for local inferencing, for the Raspberry Pi 5.

Raspberry Pi partners with Hailo for its AI extension kit

When Stacklet’s founders, Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu, came out of Capital One in 2020 to launch their startup, most companies weren’t all that concerned with constraining cloud costs. But…

Stacklet sees demand grow as companies take cloud cost control more seriously

Fivetran’s Managed Data Lake Service aims to remove the repetitive work of managing data lakes.

Fivetran launches a managed data lake service

Lance Riedel and Nigel Daley both spent decades in search discovery, but it was while working at Pinterest that they began trying to understand how to use search engines to…

How a couple of former Pinterest search experts caught Biz Stone’s attention

GetWhy helps businesses carry out market studies and extract insights from video-based interviews using AI.

GetWhy, a market research AI platform that extracts insights from video interviews, raises $34.5M

AI-powered virtual physical therapy platform Sword Health has seen its valuation soar 50% to $3 billion.

Sword Health raises $130 million and its valuation soars to $3 billion

Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa, along with three general partners, manage $1.5 billion in assets today through their Build, Venture and Seed strategies.

WndrCo officially gets into venture capital with fresh $460M across two funds

The startup targets the middle ground between platforms that offer rigid templates, and those that facilitate a full-control approach.

Storyblok raises $80M to add more AI to its ‘headless’ CMS aimed at non-technical people

The startup has been pursuing a ground-up redesign of a well-understood technology.

‘Star Wars’ lasers and waterfalls of molten salt: How Xcimer plans to make fusion power happen

Sékr, a startup that offers a mobile app for outdoor enthusiasts and campers, is launching a new AI tool for planning road trips. The new tool, called Copilot, is available…

Travel app Sékr can plan your next road trip with its new AI tool

Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights non-profit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…

Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools’ use of 365 Education suite

Since the shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, solar energy has been having a moment in Europe. Electricity prices have been going up while the investment required to get…

Samara is accelerating the energy transition in Spain one solar panel at a time

Featured Article

DEI backlash: Stay up-to-date on the latest legal and corporate challenges

It’s clear that this year will be a turning point for DEI.

18 hours ago
DEI backlash: Stay up-to-date on the latest legal and corporate challenges

The keynote will be focused on Apple’s software offerings and the developers that power them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS.

Watch Apple kick off WWDC 2024 right here

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. Unfortunately, Boeing’s Starliner launch was delayed yet again, this time due to issues with one of the three redundant computers used by United…

TechCrunch Space: China’s victory

The court ruling said that Fearless Fund’s Strivers Grant likely violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.

An appeals court rules that VC Fearless Fund cannot issue grants to Black women, but the fight continues

Instagram Threads is rolling out the ability for users to signal which sort of posts they wanted to see more or less of by swiping.

You can now customize your For You feed on Threads using swipes

The Japanese billionaire who commissioned SpaceX for a private mission around the moon on a Starship rocket has abruptly canceled the project, citing ongoing uncertainties around when the launch vehicle…

Japanese billionaire pulls plug on private ‘dearMoon’ lunar Starship mission

Malicious actors are abusing generative AI music tools to create homophobic, racist, and propagandic songs — and publishing guides instructing others how to do so. According to ActiveFence, a service…

People are using AI music generators to create hateful songs

As WWDC 2024 nears, all sorts of rumors and leaks have emerged about what iOS 18 and its AI-powered apps and features have in store.

What to expect from Apple’s AI-powered iOS 18 at WWDC

Dallas is the second city that Cruise is easing its way back into after pulling its entire U.S. fleet late last year.

GM’s Cruise is testing robotaxis in Dallas again

Featured Article

After raising $100M, AI fintech LoanSnap is being sued, fined, evicted

The company has been sued by at least seven creditors, including Wells Fargo.

22 hours ago
After raising $100M, AI fintech LoanSnap is being sued, fined, evicted