Startup Lessons and Growth Strategies: Essential Insights for Founders

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 Rathoreis 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

Complimentary Ticket:

Are you a full-time tech founder? Be our guest! We’re making our events available to tech founders everywhere. Enjoy a complimentary ticket to come learn from fellow tech founders, partners and investors. Already used your complimentary guest pass? Request an invite to see if you qualify for membership.

About Founders Network:

Founded in 2011, Founders Network offers lifelong peer mentorship to over 600 tech startup founders globally. Our platform, programs and high-touch service facilitate authentic experience sharing, warm introductions and long-term professional relationships. Additional benefits include over $500k in startup discounts and promotion to 2,000 newsletter readers. Members are located in San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, London and other tech hubs. Each month our Membership Committee admits a new cohort of full-time tech founders who are nominated by an existing member. Learn more about us 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. Read more about our Privacy Policy here.