Your vote matters! Decide which Audience Choice sessions will make it to TechCrunch Founder Summit

Each year, we get a huge influx of applicants to speak at TechCrunch’s events, and this year’s Founder Summit in Boston on November 4 will be no different! We want to thank everyone who applied to take part in our programming and to help share their expertise with the startup community.

After careful review, we have 11 finalists who are vying for four slots within this year’s event agenda, and each one showcases the kind of practical, essential insights that can only be delivered by those who have built, iterated, and succeeded.

You can vote via this link to weigh in on which sessions ultimately make the cut. Submissions will close on September 4. If you’re voting and haven’t already gotten your Founder Summit tickets this year, what are you waiting for?

On November 4 in Boston, you’ll get the chance to learn directly from the experts in intimate, exclusive sessions that can put you ahead of the competition or set you up to play a pivotal role in developing the next era of innovators. We still have discounts running on tickets that can save you up to $100 right here !

With that said, let’s dive into our Disrupt Audience Choice nominees, and remember: The voting takes place via this form, so take a look and then submit your vote!

Early-stage founders approach events one of two ways: say yes to every opportunity, or avoid them entirely because the ROI feels impossible to justify. Neither is smart. Events can build your audience and credibility before product-market fit but only if you’re strategic about which ones deserve your time and budget. We’ll discuss how to think strategically when resources are tight, including how to maximize ROI from founder events like this one. You’ll leave with frameworks for prioritizing stage-appropriate event investments, tactics for proving value without complex tools, and clarity on when events make sense and when they don’t.

Domestic manufacturing is back in the spotlight, but building hardware in the U.S. is still widely seen as too expensive to scale. This session explores how founders can design hardware companies that make “Made in the USA” economically viable from day one. We’ll break down supply chain strategy, cost structure, factory partnerships, and how policy tailwinds like the IRA and CHIPS Act change the equation. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating when domestic manufacturing can become a competitive advantage — not just a branding decision.

Pitches that change industries rarely fit existing categories — and most investors will pass on them for exactly that reason. This talk explores why the most fundable startups are often the hardest ones to describe, and what that means for how you build and position yours. Founders will leave with a clearer sense of the difference between a market insight and a market-creating idea, and what it actually takes to get a pattern-matching investor to bet on something genuinely new — before the rest of the world has a name for it.

Shishir Tewar: Head of Enterprise Data Engineering, Procore Technologies

Are messy data sources causing your LLMs to hallucinate? Relational databases struggle to bridge the semantic gap for AI.