Roundtables — some of the most popular sessions at TechCrunch Disrupt — are 30-minute expert-led discussions designed for up to 20 attendees who share an interest in a particular subject. The format allows for deeper conversation, questions and answers, as well as time for attendees to connect and explore collaborative opportunities.
The roundtables listed below are just some of the winners from our Audience Choice vote-a-thon. We asked you to vote for the topics you would most like to see at TC Disrupt on October 18-20 in San Francisco and — holy cats and dogs — what a response! We’ll announce more winners over the next few weeks, so stay tuned. Before we reveal the first set of roundtables, a bit of necessary housekeeping.
Budget alert: Early bird pricing ends on Friday, July 29 at 11:59 pm PT. Buy your pass before the deadline, and you can save up to $1,300.
These five roundtables cover a range of hot topics. From using AI to reboot fashion and retail industries, overhauling personalization and marrying product success with capital efficiency — to expanding fintechs across continents and hacking government bureaucracy — your Disrupt dance card’s gonna fill up mighty quick.
Democratizing retail with AI-powered marketplaces
Speaker: Kathy Zhou, the CTO and co-founder at Queenly
On the heels of a global pandemic and an economic downturn, the fashion and retail industries have demonstrated an urgent need for disruption. Gone are the days of individual brick-and-mortar stores with indie designers and, as consumers increase their online shopping, small business owners struggle with SEO- and social media-driven growth tactics.
Queenly’s Kathy Zhou will detail how she built a centralized managed marketplace to solve these problems for the growing formal-wear industry — including personalized recommendations, domain-specific search engines, as well as creating a tailored computer vision and machine language data pipeline for a formerly offline industry.
How to approach personalization in a post-cookie world
Speaker: Alexandre Robicquet, the co-founder and CEO at Crossing Minds
The personalization industry is long overdue for an overhaul and a new direction. Between lackluster “personalized” product recommendations and rising concerns about data privacy, customers are losing faith that online businesses have their best interests at heart. At the same time, business owners are trying to figure out the best way to meet high customer expectations while still selling their products.
Alexandre Robicquet shares how to approach personalization in a way that helps customers find their next favorite products – and lets both consumers and business owners walk away happy.
How product success and capital efficiency go hand-in-hand
Speaker: Emily G.-Cebrián Lombán, the co-founder and CEO at Froged.
As VCs tighten their tickets, are startups prepared for measures that extend their runway while building a product success model? Learn why European start-ups are better prepared and how you can do more with less.
The fintech scaling dilemma: When to expand across continents
Speaker: Yorick Naeff, the co-founder and CEO at Bux.
A growing number of U.S. tech investors are moving into Europe to capitalize on the continent’s startups. While European startups are catching up fast and are starting to close the gap with Silicon Valley, both sides are still looking to crack the code to effective scaling.
What can we learn from both Silicon Valley and European perspectives, alike? How can you effectively scale your company across countries or even continents? In this session we’ll discuss the scaling dilemma that many fintechs face.
How to build a tech team to hack government bureaucracy
Speaker: Hongyi Li, the director of Open Government Products at the Government Technology Agency of Singapore
Open Government Products (OGP), an experimental team within the Singapore government, is built like a modern tech company but works on public-sector problems. OGP has eliminated paper forms in the government, achieved a 96% vaccination rate for 5.8 million residents and facilitated the distribution of more than $240 million worth of relief aid to citizens. OGP achieved this through rapid prototyping and exploiting bureaucratic vulnerabilities.
Hongyi Li will discuss the designs and tactics used to shepherd products through bureaucratic obstacles, and how to structure a team to maximize creativity and impact in a constrained environment. The most important problems in our society are often the most bureaucratically defended, but all systems have vulnerabilities. To solve the most important problems, we need to learn how to hack this bureaucracy for the public good.
TechCrunch Disrupt takes place on October 18-20. Buy your pass before July 29 at 11:59 pm (PT), save up to $1,300, and be sure to check out all the Audience Choice roundtable sessions when you get there!
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