TiECON 2017 – Day 1 Reflections

It’s that time of year again where budding entrepreneurs, wide-eyed startups, angel investors, and venture capitalists all converge on the Santa Clara Convention Center for TieCON!

TiECON 2017 culminates 25 years of sparking entrepreneurial spirit and the rise of a global movement promoting TiE’s motto to imagine, innovate, and inflect.

Ram Reddy opens the conference with impressive statistics about attendance demographics and it’s no surprise that nearly 900 startups are in attendance this week.

Like last year, my handy dandy notebook is now full of inspiring and informative blurbs from many awe-inspiring panelists.

Below are a few of the highlights from Day 1:

Ram Reddy: Startups move at lightning speed and need easy access to domain expert mentors.

Opening Keynote, Tim Draper, gave entrepreneurs a call to action: “Do whatever it takes to make the world a better place.”

Ronjon Nag, Odel Hermoni, & Carol Sands (Words of Wisdom Panelists) all say the TEAM is the most important thing for a startup.

Ronjon Nag said to truly disrupt the market a startup must show a factor of 10 (10x) automation to a business problem. Only moving the needle incrementally isn’t enough.

Jayaram Bhat emphasized that your founding team must be playing the correct roles. You can’t have the brilliant engineer with no sales or business acumen be the CEO of your company.

Nitin Pachisia noteed that pre-seed round companies with no code are evaluated using no factual science. The evaluations are based on identifying outliers. — “How great is your team and have you solved a massive problem in a large market?”

Raj Jaswa suggested you need a founding member who has some proficiency with business development, marketing, and sales.

Finally, the night ended with the inspirational Vinod Khosla challenging entrepreneurs to “give yourselves a chance to get lucky — try more things — take more shots on goal”. Only entrepreneurs innovate beyond the conventional wisdom found within a particular vertical.

If you are not here, you should be.  This is the only place to be if you have an entrepreneurial spirit looking to network with like-minded peers and titans of the technology age.