FUNDAMENTALS
FOR STARTUPS

Join Alan Hambelton, partner in Cooley’s Private Companies practice, for an interactive session on navigating pre-seed financings. Learn the essential deal structures, investor expectations, and practical strategies to position your company for future growth. Perfect for founders, early-stage teams, and anyone preparing for their first raise.

This session distills nearly 30 years of building products inside Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon, combined with hands-on mentoring of early-stage founders—into practical lessons entrepreneurs can immediately apply.

Amit Chopra, founder, Innovation Advocate, will share how the world’s most innovative companies think about product, customers, and long-term value, and how founders can adopt those mindsets early, without slowing themselves down.

Rather than theory, the talk focuses on real frameworks used in Big Tech such as Amazon’s PR/FAQ, Google’s design sprints, and Meta’s Move fast approach, and product excellence patterns across multiple companies to help founders avoid common early-stage traps around prioritization, execution, and scaling.

The goal is simple: help startups think beyond the MVP and build products that are resilient, customer-driven, and designed to scale borrowing the DNA of Big Tech without inheriting its bureaucracy.

Venture capital isn’t the only road to building a successful company—and for many founders, it’s not even the best one. Beyond VC: The Non‑Dilutive Founder’s Path brings together entrepreneurs who have grown and scaled their startups through alternative funding strategies that preserve ownership, autonomy, and long‑term vision.

In this candid panel discussion, you’ll hear firsthand how founders leveraged tools like revenue‑based financing, grants, customer‑funded growth, strategic partnerships, and creative bootstrapping to build resilient, profitable businesses. They’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons they learned while forging their own path outside the traditional VC track.

Most ideas don’t fail because they lack funding, or ambition. They fail because they are built on assumptions about people.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a research-backed method that reduces risk early by shifting focus from finding the right solution to asking better questions. It uses empathy to learn directly from the people you aim to serve, instead of guessing stakeholder needs.

In this 60-minute lecture, Lubica Lutz introduces Human-Centered Design as a practical tool for moving ideas forward with clarity, whether you are launching a startup, translating research into impact, or shaping a new program inside an organization. Empathy is no longer a “soft skill”. It is your strategic team-member.

The lecture is intentionally designed for a mixed audience:

• founders and early startup teams
• researchers and scientists exploring real-world application
• students, public and first-time idea-makers
• employees developing new initiatives within organisations (“intrapreneurs)

No prior startup or design experience is required — and experienced innovators will still gain sharper fast techniques, and fresh perspective.

Join Brian Tagami for a talk on digital storytelling best practices for modern marketing and communication strategies—helping you deliver better outcomes for audiences during presentations. In addition to his position at Monks, Tagami is a startup and gap fund advisor, and equity holder in two Seattle biotech start-ups.