Startup companies

Startup companies

Apply to lead a roundtable session Roundtables at TC Founder Summit are built for depth, not decks. Each session is a 30-minute, informal discussion led by up to two speakers, with no slides or video - just meaningful dialogue and practical insight. These intimate conversations create space for founders to ask real questions and connect directly with experts who've been there before.

You can have all the markers of success-the steady job, the decent apartment, friends who think you're crushing it-and still feel like you're playing life on easy mode when you know you could handle expert level. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after a conversation with someone who, from the outside, looked like they had everything figured out. Good career, great relationship, traveled regularly. But over drinks, they admitted they felt like they were sleepwalking through their own life.

Her payment form wasn't connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense. I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials.

Silicon Valley is having an anti-college moment due to sky-high education fees, AI lowering the barrier to entry for skills like coding, and the shifting political and social landscape. But three young founders who dropped out of college told Business Insider that they weren't motivated by expenses or politics, but by timing. Each spotted an opportunity in the market that they couldn't resist, leading them to quit college and go all in on entrepreneurship.

Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify's director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these backend infrastructure headaches for non-technical creators. Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute - essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.

Because startups typically don't have a track record of success to attract potential clients, they can offer a trial of their platform for free or at a lower cost to showcase what their platform can do and how reliable it is. The enterprise - a potential client - can test the newest technologies without the worry of committing to a complete and often costly rollout.

The founder of one of our portfolio companies created a company with approximately $200 million in revenue purely on instinct. The founder had spent a large amount of time around the products and relationships with customers, so that he could literally go out onto the production floor and identify the machine that would be broken down in a week, and he would reject a price recommendation from his financial staff because "it didn't feel right!"

AIDAR is building the future of artist scouting. We help A&Rs and music professionals discover artists that truly fit their creative vision - using personalized AI agents that scout the global music landscape 24/7. The product is live, the beta is working, and we already have paying customers and EXIST AI Transfer funding. Role Now, we're hiring a Senior Full-Stack Engineer (m/w/d) to join AIDAR as our core technical hire.

But after years of chasing success in all the wrong places, I finally get what he meant. My first startup was everything I thought I wanted. We had funding, a slick office, and all the right buzzwords in our pitch deck. I was working 80-hour weeks, convinced that grinding harder would somehow make me love what I was doing. Spoiler alert: it didn't.

Too many founders get stuck in reactive mode, buried in meetings and fire drills. But if you're always reacting, you're not really leading. You must move from reactive operator to strategic leader, which requires a mindset shift. Understand that you're not the firefighter - you're the architect. Ask yourself: If you disappeared for two weeks, what would break? That's where your real work begins.

The first light hasn't broken yet, but somewhere in London, New York, or Silicon Valley, a millionaire is already awake. The coffee is brewing, steam curling up in the darkness. Outside, the streets are empty except for the occasional delivery truck. Inside, there's just the quiet hum of possibility-those precious hours before the world starts demanding attention. I discovered this myself when I started running my own company.

I was a CFO myself for five years previously before going into venture [...] We had thousands and thousands of customers, and we would have several people in my team that were basically just replying to queries and chasing people all day.

"LinkedIn?" She laughed. "You mean Facebook for thought leaders? No, I won't be using any of those sites."

So it was 2020, prime time of COVID, and I was feeling a little bit unsure what I wanted to do with my life. I was still, at the time, sophomore in college, sent home halfway through university. And one of my friends had been sharing that she was working on a mobile app around biking. I basically contacted her. We decided to work together, and from there really grew from working and contributing as an intern, to founding engineer.

Marketers have spent decades optimising for blue links on a search results page. Now every CMO conversation starts with the same question: 'How do we look in ChatGPT?' People ask an AI assistant and get a short list of recommended options. If your brand isn't in that answer, you're effectively invisible, even if you did everything 'right' in SEO. Kime exists to make that visibility gap measurable and give teams a way to act on it.

The Next Web (TNW) is making a bold move: its flagship conference is relocating to London, placing TNW's main annual event at the centre of one of the world's most powerful technology and investment ecosystems. The move marks a significant moment for TNW and signals a broader evolution of the brand's global events strategy. A new concept: TNW Gathering Alongside the move to London, TNW is introducing a new global event concept: TNW Gathering.

In just 3 days, the best deal at the lowest ticket prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 disappear. With demand already surging and early inventory moving fast, this is the final window to lock in record-low pricing and secure a plus-one for half the price while limited passes remain. If Disrupt has been on your must-attend list, now is the time to save up to $680 on your pass and bring a plus-one at 50% off.