Fortnite to Factories: Embracing an Increasingly Digital World

Learn how you can improve your efforts as a founder, walk away with outcomes you can apply directly to your business, and strengthen your relationships with peers and content experts.

Light refreshments will be provided with networking opportunities.

Join us for an insightful panel conversation delving into the profound impact of digitalization on industries and consumer interactions, and how businesses are strategically preparing for the future. In this engaging session, we’ll explore innovative approaches taken by industry leaders, including ventures into virtual realms such as Fortnite and Apple Vision Pro. This event aims to provide founders, the teams, and innovators with actionable insights to broaden their reach among emerging generations of consumers while navigating the evolving digital landscape.

Our expert panelists will tackle pressing questions such as how the emergence of GenZ is reshaping consumer interactions, and whether traditional marketing channels need to adapt to effectively engage with this digital-savvy audience. Additionally, we’ll delve into the potential of spatial computing and virtual reality in business contexts, beyond their current consumer-centric applications. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain valuable perspectives and strategies for future planning, as we collectively embrace the challenges and opportunities presented by an increasingly digital world.

Meet Our Panelists:

Jon Curtis, IT Innovation Strategist, BMW
Dr. Marcin Ziolkowski – Emerging Technology Manager, BMW
Burak Soehmelioglu – Emerging Technology Manager, BMW
Brent Westmoreland – IT Director, Strategy, Cybersecurity and Innovation, BMW

Profit First: Getting to Profitability with a Product/Service Quickly →

Learn how you can improve your efforts as a founder, walk away with outcomes you can apply directly to your business, and strengthen your relationships with peers and content experts.

Light refreshments will be provided with networking opportunities.

Profit First – Getting to profitability with a product/service quickly

Discover the keys to getting to profitability fast and gain insights from an experienced CFO, learning practical strategies. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to strengthen your business foundation!

Meet Shondra

After working as a technology investment banker at one of the fastest-growing investment banking firms in the world, Shondra Washington founded TBC-Capital, an advisory and consulting firm offering on-demand CFO, business development, and strategy services for VC-backed companies and small businesses. Through TBC-Capital, Shondra has helped her clients secure over $40M in startup capital. Her work has been featured in Reuters and Inc. Magazine.

Shondra is also the CEO and cofounder of Black@, the first all-Black Web3 communities. Black@ brings together creators, artists, investors, and engineers working together to increase ownership of Black culture in the next generation of the Internet.

LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/shondra-washington/

IG@shondradanielle

How We Build Things: The Functional Team of Product+Engineering+Design →

Learn how you can improve your efforts as a founder, walk away with outcomes you can apply directly to your business, and strengthen your relationships with peers and content experts.

Light refreshments will be provided with networking opportunities.

Building a Cross-Functional Team

A highly collaborative product, design, and engineering team form the backbone of successful modern tech companies. It’s through this “three-legged stool” approach that many of the products or services we love have been conceived and delivered. John and David each have experienced how this works at large companies and small startups. The goal of this session is to outline best practices and provide real-world examples of how this approach to team-building creates great outcomes for users and the business.

Meet John & David!

David Siglin has broad experience working as a developer, head of design, and head of product. He has seen how tight collaboration across these functions creates phenomenal outcomes for startups, and large companies alike. He’s currently a Principal Designer at Stitch Fix. Outside of work, David is active in the design community, giving talks on design, mentoring those looking to break into design, and advising startups on product and design strategy.

John Barnett is the Co-founder of Supermoon, previously CEO and Co-founder of Chroma Labs (developer of the Chroma Stories app, acquired by Twitter), and the creator of Boomerang from Instagram. Over the last 15 years, John led the development and launch of 6 apps with over 450M downloads.

Before founding Chroma Labs, John was the PM for the Facebook Camera, and a PM on Facebook’s AI team, focused on the future of visual creation and innovative consumer AR/AI applications. He was also a PM on Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning team, and Gen-Z team, and Instagram’s Story, Video, Profile, and Creation teams. John helped create and launch both Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories, along with helping to develop and pitch the initial product concept and framing of the market opportunity for WhatsApp “Status” in early 2016 (now the world’s most used Story product.)