Unconference: Early Stage Startups

From the same track

Session

From Founding Engineer to CTO to CEO – At the Same Startup

Monday Nov 17 / 10:35AM PST

As a college sophomore, I founded Pointz, initially building its core routing engine from scratch. I architected the platform’s safety rating algorithm, integrating geospatial data structures, crowdsourced inputs, and multi-criteria decision-making to deliver context-aware routing.

Speaker image - Trisha Ballakur

Trisha Ballakur

Co-Founder and CEO @Pointz, Forbes 30 Under 30 2025, Previously @Techstars and @Adobe

Session

From Staff Platform Engineer to a 16z Founder: What I Wish I'd Known

Monday Nov 17 / 11:45AM PST

The Technical Leadership Challenge: Every successful engineering team faces the same inflection point: transforming beloved internal tools into a legitimate platform business.

Speaker image - Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado

Gonzalo (Glo) Maldonado

CTO & Cofounder of @Mocksi.ai, Staff Platform Engineer Turned Startup Founder, Turns Developer Platforms into Products, Temporal & MCP Fanatic

Session

Maximizing Success with Limited Time, Resources, and Energy: Lessons from Startup Engineering

Monday Nov 17 / 02:45PM PST

Startups are the harshest environments for engineers. Limited time, resources, and energy force teams to make decisions under pressure — and those decisions can determine whether a company survives or stalls.

Speaker image - David Gudeman

David Gudeman

Co-Founder and CTO @Velocity AI

Session

The Future of Engineering: Mindsets That Matter When Code Isn’t Enough

Monday Nov 17 / 03:55PM PST

Since the first compiler, software has been a stack of human-friendly abstractions translated into machine instructions. The engineers who understood at least some of what was going on under the hood were essential—indispensable even. But now?

Speaker image - Ben Greene

Ben Greene

4X Founding CTO, Co-Founder and CTO @Tessi, Co-Creator of FreeFormula.Exchange, CTO-in-Residence at Techstars Boston

Session

The First 100 Days of Code: What to Build, What to Buy, and What to Borrow

Monday Nov 17 / 05:05PM PST

Details coming soon.