The who’s who of the Silicon Valley startup scene is meeting this week at the 2019 Startup Grind Global Conference in Redwood City, California, a small town near Palo Alto that was once ridiculed as “Deadwood City” but has since become a significant tech hub in the region—its home to Oracle, Electronic Arts, Box.com, Evernote, Impossible Foods, Nintendo, Sumo Logic and soon to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic company created by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. More than 8,000 people, mostly entrepreneurs, venture capital (VC) investors, and professional services providers (lawyers, accountants, etc…) are expected to attend the two-day event, which kicks off tomorrow with discussions led by Stripe cofounder John Collison, Front CEO Mathilde Collin, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Melanie Whelan, CEO of SoulCycle, and investors Jessica Verrilli (Google Ventures), Bryan Schreier (Sequoia Capital), and Steven Sinofsky (Andreessen Horowitz).
For its seventh annual edition—the fourth in Redwood City—the conference organizers have planned five concurrent stages (main, growth, storytelling, developer, venture capital), with high-quality content provided by a roster of nearly 200 world-class entrepreneurs and investors. Startup Grind came a long way since it was founded in Silicon Valley in 2010 by Derek Andersen and Spencer Nielson. Back in the day, I remember attending the company’s meetups in borrowed spaces that were gathering just a few dozen local entrepreneurs seeking funding, partnerships, and sometimes new hires and mentors.
At the Startup Grind Global Conference this week, an underrated conference about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley—alongside The Startup Conference next June—more than 200 startups from around the world will be pitching and below is our selection of the 19 to watch for at the event. By Jean Baptiste Su, Contributor, Vice-President of Advanced Technologies at Atherton Research
via Forbes