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Mike Judge to join us at Disrupt SF 2018
Silicon Valley, for better and oftentimes worse, provides an uncanny valley view of the ups and downs of IRL Silicon Valley.
The HBO series has shown what it’s like to deal with an incumbent who steals an idea or IP, the humiliation of saving the day, only to be fired as CEO by your VC, or the fear and exhilaration of competing on the Startup Battlefield stage — a familiar spot for those who have been to Disrupt.
TechCrunch is helping create another Silicon Valley meta moment. Silicon Valley co-creator Mike Judge will join us on stage at TC Disrupt SF.
Interestingly, Judge joined a team from HBO at Disrupt well before Silicon Valley ever aired, doing research for the then-forthcoming series. And, of course, Season 1 ended with the Startup Battlefield stage.
The cycle continued in 2016, when Judge came on stage to discuss what it’s like to parody Silicon Valley culture.
And round and round we go.
Judge has been in the entertainment industry for a long time, creating Beavis and Butt-head, co-creating King of the Hill, and serving as writer and director for classic films like Office Space and Idiocracy.
As Silicon Valley heads into its sixth season, we’re excited to chat with Judge about the direction of the show and the evolution of the media industry as a whole.
And hey, maybe we’ll hear a few spoilers for the upcoming season.
Tickets to the Disrupt SF 2018 are available right here.
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Reid Hoffman to talk ‘blitzscaling’ at Disrupt SF 2018
When it comes to scaling startups, few people are as accomplished or consistently successful as Reid Hoffman .
While the rest of us consider scaling a startup to market domination a daunting task, Hoffman has continued to make it look easy.
In September, Hoffman will join us at TC Disrupt SF to share his strategies on “blitzscaling,” which also happens to be the title of his forthcoming book.
Hoffman started out his Silicon Valley career at PayPal, serving as EVP and a founding board member. In 2003, Hoffman founded LinkedIn from his living room. LinkedIn now has more than 500 million members across 200 countries and territories across the world, effectively becoming a necessity to the professional marketplace.
Hoffman left LinkedIn in 2007, but his contributions to the company certainly helped turn it into the behemoth it is today, going public in 2011 and selling to Microsoft for a whopping $26.2 billion in 2016.
At Disrupt, he’ll outline some of the methodology behind going from startup to scale up that is outlined in his new book, Blitzscaling, co-authored with Chris Yeh:
Blitzscaling is a specific set of practices for igniting and managing dizzying growth; an accelerated path to the stage in a startup’s life-cycle where the most value is created. It prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, and allows a company to go from “startup” to “scaleup” at a furious pace that captures the market.
Drawing on their experiences scaling startups into billion-dollar businesses, Hoffman and Yeh offer a framework for blitzscaling that can be replicated in any region or industry. Readers will learn how to design business models that support lightning-fast growth, navigate necessary shifts in strategy at each level of scale, and weather the management challenges that arise as their company grows.
Today, Hoffman leads Greylock Partners’ Discovery Fund, where he invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies. He currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo and Microsoft. Hoffman’s place in the VC world is a natural continuation of his angel investing. His angel portfolio includes companies like Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga.
Hoffman has also invested in tech that affects positive change, serving on the non-profit boards of Biohub, Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.org.
Blitzscaling marks Hoffman’s third book (others include The Startup of You and The Alliance) and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him teach us a thing or two at Disrupt SF.
Tickets to Disrupt SF are available now right here.
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Ring’s Jamie Siminoff and Clinc’s Jason Mars to join us at Disrupt SF
Disrupt SF is set to be the biggest tech conference that TechCrunch has ever hosted. So it only makes sense that we plan an agenda fit for the occasion.
That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to announce that Ring’s Jamie Siminoff will join us on stage for a fireside chat and Jason Mars from Clinc will be demo-ing first-of-its-kind technology on the Disrupt SF stage.
Jamie Siminoff – Ring
Earlier this year, Ring became Amazon’s second largest acquisition ever, selling to the behemoth for a reported $1 billion.
But the story begins long ago, with Jamie Siminoff building a WiFi-connected video doorbell in his garage in 2011. Back then it was called DoorBot. Now, it’s called Ring, and it’s an essential piece of the overall evolution of e-commerce.
As giants like Amazon move to make purchasing and receiving goods as simple as ever, safe and reliable entry into the home becomes critical to the mission. Ring, which has made neighborhood safety and home security its main priority since inception, is a capable partner in that mission.
Of course, one doesn’t often build a successful company and sell for $1 billion on their first go. Prior to Ring, Siminoff founded PhoneTag, the world’s first voicemail-to-text company and Unsubscribe.com. Both of those companies were sold. Based on his founding portfolio alone, it’s clear that part of Siminoff’s success can be attributed to understanding what consumers need and executing on a solution.
Dr. Jason Mars – Clinc
AI has the potential to change everything, but there is a fundamental disconnect between what AI is capable of and how we interface with it. Clinc has tried to close that gap with its conversational AI, emulating human intelligence to interpret unstructured, unconstrained speech.
Clinc is currently targeting the financial market, letting users converse with their bank account using natural language without any pre-defined templates or hierarchical voice menus.
But there are far more applications for this kind of conversational tech. As voice interfaces like Alexa and Google Assistant pick up steam, there is clearly an opportunity to bring this kind of technology to all facets of our lives.
At Disrupt SF, Clinc’s founder and CEO Dr. Jason Mars plans to do just that, debuting other ways that Clinc’s conversational AI can be applied. Without ruining the surprise, let me just say that this is going to be a demo you won’t want to miss.
Tickets to Disrupt are available here.
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Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse and Michael Arrington to talk cryptocurrency at Disrupt SF
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Arrington XRP Capital founder (and TechCrunch founder) Michael Arrington will be joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September to talk money.
Garlinghouse has had a long and storied career in the tech industry, serving as a senior vice president at Yahoo!, president of Consumer Applications at AOL and CEO of the file collaboration service Hightail. But in 2016, Garlinghouse was promoted from COO to CEO at payment services company Ripple.
Ripple’s goal is to try to make it as easy as possible to transfer money between two stores of value. Right now, that process is incredibly tedious, with no unifying structure to send money overseas or to underbanked communities. The notion of a unifying ledger is not a new one, but it’s one that’s transformed Ripple into a full-fledged company.
But Ripple also created the world’s third-largest digital token, XRP. The token has a current total market cap around $30 billion, and the company is working to expand the use cases for XRP, which has primarily been marketed as a tool for banks but has only attracted cross-border payment services.
As cryptocurrencies continue to evolve and gain mainstream attention, questions continue to mount around how these tokens will revolutionize the economy and gain utility.
TechCrunch founder and former Editor-In-Chief Michael Arrington will join Garlinghouse onstage to discuss the evolution of cryptocurrencies. Arrington left TechCrunch in 2011 and went on to start CrunchFund, which has invested in big-name startups such as Uber, Airbnb and Yammer.
In 2016, Arrington reduced his role at CrunchFund and has since started Arrington XRP Capital, a $100 million digital asset management firm in blockchain-based capital markets. Ripple is one of the first portfolio companies for Arrington XRP Capital.
This comes at a time when the SEC is doing everything it can to learn more about cryptocurrencies, sending out subpoenas to crypto funds far and wide, including Arrington XRP Capital.
This conversation is sure to be an interesting one, and one you won’t want to miss. Tickets to Disrupt SF (September 5 to September 7) are available now.
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And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2017 is… Pi
Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $50,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down… Read More
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Tomorrow looks to make it easier to draw up plans for a will and life insurance
Talking about filling out a will and setting up life insurance is probably one of the more sensitive subjects you’ll tackle as you get older — but Dave Hanley says it’s something that a lot of people end up dodging altogether. That’s why he started Tomorrow, a company that makes it easier to set up life insurance and how assets and guardianship are divvied up. Rather… Read More
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Alexa Shop Assist wins the Disrupt SF 2017 Hackathon Grand Prize
Hundreds of engineers and designers got together to come up with something cool, something neat, something awesome. The only condition was that they only had 24 hours to work on their projects. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regulars. Some of them slept on the floor in a corner, while others drank too much Red Bull.
We could all feel the… Read More
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TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 will feature some of tech’s wildest success stories
TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017 is less than a month away at Pier 48 in San Francisco. This year’s lineup includes a stellar group of speakers, including Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann, Golden State Warriors superstar forward (and also investor) Kevin Durant, Forerunner Venture’s Kirsten Green and Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun. Read More
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Let’s meet in Warsaw
Just in time for Disrupt SF I’d like to invite you all to a micro meet-up in Warsaw on July 4. We’ll be holding it at Campus Warsaw, 33C Ząbkowska, 03-736 Warszawa, Poland. The fun starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm with some after-event drinks nearby. The winner of the pitch-off will get a table at Disrupt SF and the second-place winner will get two tickets to Disrupt SF. There are… Read More
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Let’s meet in Warsaw in July
Just in time for Disrupt SF I’d like to invite you all to a micro meet-up in Warsaw on July 4. We’ll be holding it at Campus Warsaw, 33C Ząbkowska, 03-736 Warszawa, Poland. The fun starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm with some after-event drinks nearby. The winner of the pitch-off will get a table at Disrupt SF and the second-place winner will get two tickets to Disrupt SF. There are… Read More
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