fnGlobal Keynote & Roundtables with Surbhi Rathore (November 20, 2025)

Building a startup is equal parts discipline, resilience, adaptability, and vision. In this session, we’ll share the bearings we gain as first-time founders — from getting an early product to market, to scaling with discipline, to navigating exits. Together, we’ll explore the lessons that matter most: how to prioritize when everything feels urgent, how to read market signals without getting distracted, and why going deep with the right customer persona is often the fastest path to momentum.

We’ll also look at some of the less obvious but critical pieces — keeping exit options alive from day one, aligning incentives across the org so everyone rows in the same direction, and building strong co-founder dynamics that help us survive the hardest moments.

Finally, we’ll dive into practical strategies: how to de-risk at every stage, assemble a team that can ship a real MVP, validate with customers on the path to product-market fit, and work with the right type of investors at the right stage.

Whether we’re building our first company or our next, this conversation is about frameworks, scars, and stories that help us navigate uncertainty and make sharper decisions along the way.

Opening Remarks @ 9:30am PT

Join us for opening remarks with Dina Wagner, Head of Member Success at Founders Network, to get the latest updates from the Network and opportunities for getting involved.

Keynote Speaker @ 9:40am PT

Surbhi Rathore is the co-founder and former CEO of Symbl.ai, a real-time conversational intelligence platform. She scaled the product, raised $33M in venture funding, grew through strong product-led adoption, and led Symbl through its acquisition by Invoca in 2025.

She now serves as VP of AI Products & Strategy at Invoca, where she leads the company’s AI platform and multimodal agent systems across voice, messaging, and key marketing workflows. Her work focuses on building AI systems that are contextual, reliable, and usable at enterprise scale.

Surbhi’s journey spans deep engineering roots, building developer platforms from the ground up, and navigating the founder-to-operator transition as an immigrant. She brings a pragmatic lens to product-market fit, team clarity, and scaling AI products in fast-moving markets—grounded in lessons from building in hard environments and driving real impact across products, teams, and customers.

Stage-Based Roundtables @ 10:30am PT

Community Partners:

Jeff Erickson

Jeff leads the Partnerships Team at Forecastr — a leading FP&A software company that helps startups create kick-butt financial models to impress investors, confidently raise capital, and effectively run their businesses better.

Jeff serves on the advisory boards of several startup companies and is an active angel investor. He's passionate about startups and enjoys working with founders and mentoring entrepreneurs.

Jeff is an experienced entrepreneur and was the founder and CEO of a successful consumer goods company that he rapidly grew from $1M in sales its first year to over $40M in annual revenue in its fourth year of operations and was ranked #138 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies.

Prior to founding his own company, Jeff was a partner at Beanstalk Partners where he led the sales and business development activities. He also served as the National Sales Director for a venture-backed tech startup where he generated over $45M in client contracts and developed the company’s channel partner program.

Jeff has a degree in accounting and graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Utah. After receiving his MBA in Finance from the University of Utah he served as the Vice President of Investments for Sentry Financial Corporation.

Blake Caldwell

Blake Caldwell is the CEO & Founder of FoundersBoost. He has 350 alumni, 100 new startups a year, 8k newsletter readers. He's driven by his passions to create and build community. He's also the founder of 2332 Collective (music production & festivals with the goal of bringing music to West LA) & The MoGuard (consumer product cup attachment protecting glorious mustaches).

FoundersBoost is a free pre-seed & seed stage mentorship driven pre-accelerator helping promising tech-startups with accelerators, investment, and revenue.

Guests Are Welcome!

Please bring a guest! Every member can bring one (1) guest to each event. Each guest must be a full-time tech startup founder so they can bring new perspectives, skillsets, and experience to your chapter.

All guests must be full-time tech startup founders and you can register them directly on this function page. See How to Register a Guest here.

Confidentiality Policy:

All information shared within Founders Network is strictly confidential. We are built on a foundation of trust, and the community takes confidentiality seriously. Investors, members, and staff all share experiences and opinions off the record. In this roundtable forum, we continue to model our fnValues of Reciprocity, Humility, Authenticity and Inclusivity.