LA Tech Week · Ideas People Opportunities
Oct 16, 2026 · 1:00 to 2:00 PM PDT · Virtual
The last session of the week, built from questions founders submitted across SF and LA Tech Week. Here is what was said, and who was in the room. If you could not get in, or only caught the tail end, the whole hour is written out below.
Alenka said it twice: do not just introduce yourself, go click on everyone else's LinkedIn and connect. The chat is gone. This is not.
Founder, Luvira. Fractional executive and growth operator.
Founder, SAHA. Holistic health provider matchmaking.
Also runs Rent a Founder Club and takes one-on-one hourly co-founding work.
In the room. Asked for the direct link to a resource mentioned on the call.
KOL and UGC growth at Hyperknow.
Founder, Doggy Daddy. Content development executive, storyteller and community builder.
Dog co-parenting. Alenka used it as the worked example for building an initial ICP.
Senior Designer at Speedo. Women's lifestyle, active and swim. Previously Abercrombie and Fitch. Leading AI in design.
Creative Technologist.
Was a software engineer, now starting a business in creative tech.
Asked in the chat to be added to the list.
Full-stack software engineer and founder at intuitivEarth. AI applications and automation.
Former Intergovernmental Affairs Coordinator at The White House.
Builds Dupe, working with creators on the back end.
Jasmeet cited her approach of showing creators the claims they have open and where money is being lost.
Co-founder, Arcus Climate.
Climate and energy strategy for non-hyperscale AI. Starting GTM outreach next week, and said in the chat to email him.
Founder, Rhayo. Two-time founder. Recruitment, talent curation and HR tech.
Founder and CEO, DyeConverter. Clean-label technology. Previously Nestle.
Project Manager and QA Automation Lead. Test automation in C# and Python, AI testing, SaMD and regulated software delivery.
Offered in the chat to beta test anyone's app. Both hosts called it out.
Physician Assistant. Holistic health and wellness, finance.
Customer success and client solutions leader. Entertainment, content and streaming.
Principal and Director, RxHealing.
Offered Jasmeet EdTech middle school district admin contacts in Southern California, and pointed the AR game founder toward escape rooms looking for a new offering.
Machine Learning Engineer. End-to-end ML, MLOps and predictive analytics. Industrial engineer turning production data into deployed models.
Send your name, your LinkedIn, what you are building and what you are looking for, and you will be added.
contact@millennialscreatives.com
Alenka Kyslik, from 15 years on the product side.
Make decisions on data, not ego. Alenka worked at a video game company clearing more than $10 million a month that is no longer doing as well as it should, because the decisions were ego-driven rather than data-driven.
Two questions decide whether an opportunity is real. Why is nothing already out there working, and will people actually pay for it.
Are people willing to pry open their wallets and pay you for it? Or are they already paying someone for something equivalent, and would pay you for something better?Alenka Kyslik
Your customer understands their need differently than the experts in your space do. Trainers and nutritionists had been solving weight loss for decades. GLP-1 drugs took off because they matched how the customer understood the problem, not how the expert did.
Lead with value. Alenka's test case is Uber, and specifically how impossible it was to find a taxi late at night in Montreal. The value was not the app. It was a car coming to you instead of wandering the street after the subway closed.
Then watch for champions, which she defines as people obsessed with what you are building who tell other people about it without being asked. Keep what is working and drop what is not.
Jasmeet's correction to every founder who answers "all women" or "anyone with skin": that is not a target market. Work down from total addressable market to ICP to initial ICP by answering four things. How many people have this problem and what source proves that number. Which of them can you actually reach and serve. Who is willing to pay today. And how is the problem being solved right now.
The worked example was the Oura Ring. A $55 billion market narrowed to $418 million by picking one initial ICP: US tech workers who already wear a tracker and want better sleep. Roughly 2 million people willing to spend about $200. They reached them through podcasts, Reddit and run clubs, because that is where those people already were.
Alenka walked the law of diffusion of innovations, which comes out of a 1960s study on how farmers adopted new equipment, and which shows up in Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Sinek's Start With Why.
Innovators buy on belief. They feel the pain intimately, they trust that you understand it better than anyone else, and they need no proof. They are the people asking for a way to give you money.
Early adopters are professional lurkers. They are the ones who say that's really interesting, get back to me when you have people.Alenka Kyslik
Early adopters need testimonials and data first. Not a lot, but something. Do not dismiss them, because you want them waiting in the wings. But chasing them before you have proof is why founders spend months hitting their head against a wall.
Innovators are category-specific. The same person can be first in line for something new at a farmers market and dead last on a car, so work out who the innovators are in your category.
Your initial ICP is your customer definition with innovator characteristics laid on top of it.
Find what they already pay for. If you are building a styling app, your competitor is a human stylist, and what people pay a stylist tells you their disposable income and their appetite. Jasmeet's scorecard checks three things: is there a buying trigger, is there a budget they are comfortable with, and do they see the value.
Do not tell me you conducted a survey and did not include the price question.Jasmeet Kaur
You have to be willing and capable of selling. The signal that your messaging works is not one nice person agreeing to a call, it is a conversion rate across many.
Alenka has run over 100 discovery calls per business, and says it changed everything. Her question is some version of what is the number one thing you need help with right now, or what is keeping you up at night. Ask for one thing.
That question moved her whole model. She had assumed providers wanted better back-end systems, because she loves optimizing operations. They told her they wanted clients. She pivoted to getting them clients, and charges 18% of each appointment booked with nothing upfront, which nothing else in her market does.
When you have built real rapport with a new contact and a third person joins, ask your contact to introduce you to them. You hear your own message in someone else's mouth and learn exactly which words landed. Alenka has done this repeatedly, first at a conference in Vegas with a benefits lead at a company that was an ideal customer for her.
She had already emailed that person. She spent the night before the conference sending over a hundred emails to benefits professionals she found through the event's networking tool, rather than going through the conference app.
Do not hire for go-to-market before you have tried it yourself. If you are not converting, nobody you hire will either, because you have not yet proven the messaging works. Bring in a fractional executive to help you build positioning if you need to, but you still have to do the selling, because you know the product best. Build the playbook first: your ICP, the questions you ask, what onboarding looks like. Then hand it over.
The last half hour, after most of the room had already left. It was the most practical stretch of the call.
This was the sharpest thing Alenka said all hour. Do not hand a customer access to the product before you have watched them interact with it, because when they drop off you will have no idea why.
She had over 100 signups and about 10 stuck around, and she did not know why.Alenka Kyslik, on a founder she works with
The fix was to stop letting people sign up alone. The founder started saying some version of I think this would be a good fit for you, it will take two minutes, here is a 15 minute booking, let's do it together. She has had 100% retention since. What she learned was that the tutorial she thought was clever, nobody understood.
So if you run in-person beta events where you cannot actually watch people and talk to them, you will not get the feedback you need. That comes later, at scale. First you need the calls.
Jasmeet's split: if you only want to know whether the thing is buggy or holds 15 users at once, that is not your ICP's job. Use interns or people outside your target audience, the way films use focus groups. Keep it separate from validation.
Alenka ran her own beta as a live call with her champions, who were not technical, screen recording and uploading to Google Drive while she watched. They were all on Android and Windows. Someone said it was not working on their iPhone. Nobody had tested Safari.
What a wrong guess costs. An edtech company built a mobile app for elementary and middle schoolers while selling to administrators. Nobody would sign, not even unpaid pilots, until there was a web app, because schools will not have students download an app onto a personal phone and many of those students did not have one. Six to eight months gone, roadmap pushed, close to starting over.
And in the other direction: a founder serving a lower-income audience started her beta on iPhone and had 10 users. She launched on Android and more than doubled them, because that is what her people carry.
Jasmeet's operating rhythm, and the clearest practical thing in the hour.
Context switching, overwhelm and information overload are what actually sink a bootstrapped founder. So she assigns the week by hat rather than by task list, notifications off.
Grant applications and investors both ask for traction, and most founders do not arrive with an audience or automatic credibility. Three routes came up.
Alenka Look at how Splitwise talks about it. Different market, same communication problem. Then build a small free calculator that shows them what they are losing, and collect the email.
Also look for money that is not the user. Referral fees from the lawyers or distributors in your space can be substantial. Studio bookings, listings, partner fees. If a booking earns you 30 to 50 dollars while the studio makes hundreds, you can afford to give the tool away and grow much faster.
Jasmeet Lead with what they can access, not with what they are losing. Fear-mongering is the easy version and it is worse.
Both, immediately Light stalking.
Work out which conferences and events your decision makers actually attend, and be sure it is the right room. A medical conference full of sales reps is not where service-provider decision makers are. Jasmeet got into mom groups and PTAs to reach school administrators for edtech, and she is not a mom.
Alenka Go where their families are. Decision makers in their 40s and 50s have teenagers. Look at return-to-office policies to work out the neighborhoods, then the schools, then the events.
Alenka, on enterprise A two to three year sales cycle will outlast your runway, and a single large contract can end you. The company she worked for went bankrupt when its one big client took the work in-house. Do not skip the small and mid-sized market while you wait.
Jasmeet Look for the groups inside an institution that hold their own budget. College and school gaming chapters run their own competitions on money that is not tied to the administration or the district, so they can agree to a pilot on their own. She has a client whose product is still buggy and who is already securing partnerships that way.
Jasmeet, on what he already had He ran an event where 130 said they were coming, 25 showed up, and 3 were genuinely engaged, all USC students. That is the initial ICP. Go back to those 3, ask what they loved and why they stayed, and build the persona out of their answers rather than guessing at it.
Alenka You do not have to. People sell hard to anyone with founder in their title because they assume you have money, and most of us do not. Advice from someone who has only worked in corporate will point you at paid research, because that is what corporate does.
Do 30 to 100 customer discovery conversations instead. If your product is ready and it feels right, it should never feel like selling. It should feel like they are eager.
Jasmeet And the cost is not only the money. Running an event takes planning and logistics, and if all that effort produces one person who gives you real feedback, that is not the right way to put your product in front of people.
Jasmeet The baseline is someone willing to pay. Past that, is your product satisfying a strong demand in a well-defined way. Do you have enough customers who want it, use it, and pay for it.
The icing is advocacy. Are they telling other people without you asking them to.
Alenka That is them bringing it up, not you prompting it. And they have already paid, downloaded, or invested in whatever way you asked them to.
Jasmeet, four words for it Organic demand. Strong retention. Customer pull. Willingness to pay.
The room filled up and some people never got in. Everything that was said is written out above. Here is the rest.
Building a company without outside capital changes every decision you make, from hiring and pricing to how quickly you grow. The hour covered where to spend and where to stay lean, hiring, pricing, sales, product development, building systems that scale without adding cost, finding customers early, and knowing when an expense is actually worth it.
It was the last of several sessions Jasmeet and Alenka ran across SF and LA Tech Week, and the topics came from questions founders submitted during the week rather than from a prepared curriculum.
A strategic operations advisor to startups and growth-stage companies, working as a fractional operations partner. She builds the structure founders do not have time to build themselves: org structure and roles as a team grows, and compensation frameworks that hold up as the company scales.
Her background is M&A strategy for national and cross-border expansion, acquisition integration, and P&L and financial analysis, so she also prepares companies for M&A and gets them diligence-ready. She is an advisor and operating partner to founders, VC firms and a private equity firm, and was a guest mentor this year for TechCrunch and gener8tor. Luvira works hourly, by project and on retainer, and an eight week founder acceleration program starts in the new year.
Fifteen years in software and product development, taking products from concept to launch. SAHA Collective is a platform for people who have not found answers in conventional medicine. Alongside it she works with founders as a fractional co-founder, hourly, helping them get their products in front of clients, and she hosts Rent a Founder Club.
Jasmeet said on the call that the recording, the slides, her ICP scorecard as a Google Sheet, and a set of tools and resources are all going out by email to everyone who attended. If you registered and want them, ask her directly. If you were not on the attendee list, this page is the next best thing.