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Nine out of ten startups fail. The primary reason that startups don’t succeed is because they fail to achieve product-market fit. In this talk, serial entrepreneur Shirish Nadkarni discussed the importance of riding technology or global macro trends to displace incumbents. He shared the importance of conducting customer discovery in a highly disciplined manner to really understand customer pain points and testing value propositions through online advertising. Finally, Shirish outlined the key metrics that you need to track to determine if you have achieved product-market fit.

Shirish Nadkarni is a serial entrepreneur with proven success in creating multiple consumer businesses that have scaled to tens of millions of users worldwide. Shirish was the co-founder of Livemocha, the world’s largest language learning site with 15+ million registered members from over 200 countries. Livemocha was acquired by RosettaStone in 2013. Prior to Livemocha, Shirish was the founder of TeamOn Systems, a mobile wireless e-mail pioneer that was acquired by BlackBerry in 2002. The TeamOn technology served as the core foundation for Blackberry Internet E-mail which serviced over 50 million BlackBerry users. Shirish started his career at Microsoft where engineered the acquisition of Hotmail and launched MSN.Com which became a leading web portal in the early days of the internet. Shirish is the author of “From Startup to Exit – An Insider’s Guide to launching and scaling your Tech business”. Shirish received his MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He serves on the board of TiE Seattle where he chairs a number of programs including the GoVertical Startup Creation Workshop, the TiE Entrepreneur Institute and the Z5 Catalyst funding initiative