SF Tech Week is back, October 5-11. For one week the Bay Area is full of the founders, investors, and operators you actually want in a room, and the conversations worth having are the ones you can get into.
FounderNexus is in five of them, across the first three days, with Court Lorenzini in every session:
- Monday, 3:00 PM. How to make trust your GTM advantage. Silicon Valley Bank, San Francisco.
- Monday, 5:00 PM. When and how to expand beyond your core, with Dave Hersh.
- Tuesday, 6:40 PM. Court's fireside on starting, surviving, and scaling. 377 Geary Blvd, San Francisco.
- Wednesday, 10:10 AM. Investing in the physical future. Silicon Valley Bank, San Francisco.
- Wednesday, 1:30 PM. When founders stop being CEOs, at GTM Unplugged LIVE. Wells Fargo Innovation Center, Menlo Park.
Monday, October 5, 3:00-5:00 PM: How to Make Trust Your GTM Advantage
Silicon Valley Bank, San Francisco.
AI has made it easier to produce polished content, personalized outreach, and more GTM activity. When everyone can generate more volume, volume stops being an advantage.
This is the session if the pipeline is busy and the buyer still will not move. Court Lorenzini, Founding CEO of DocuSign and Founder of FounderNexus, will work a real company and a real GTM challenge live: where trust is breaking down, what the customer still has to believe, and what evidence moves a buyer from interest to action. The three kinds of trust on the table are trust in the founder, trust in the product, and trust in the category.
Monday, October 5, 5:00-6:00 PM: When and How to Expand Beyond Your Core Business
Court stays for a second session the same afternoon. This one is with Dave Hersh.
Your core business is working, and you are looking for the next source of growth. The question is whether customers are pulling you into a new market, or you are pushing into one and mistaking effort for demand. Court and Dave will talk through expansion decisions they have made, what went wrong, and what they would do differently.
You will leave with a clearer read on what has to be proven before you commit people and money, how founder psychology and investor pressure push companies to expand too early, and whether AI is a real opening into human-centered businesses such as services, education, and community.
Tuesday, October 6, 6:40 PM: Starting, Surviving & Scaling
Court's fireside is at 6:40 PM. The evening runs 5:30-8:00 PM at 377 Geary Blvd, San Francisco.
Court moderates Leo Kayali, Founder of Invo Station, and James Win, Founder of TalentOS. The ground they cover is early traction, fundraising, hiring, pivots, uncertainty, and building in the age of AI. The decision underneath all of it is the one founders usually get wrong in both directions: whether the company is actually ready to scale.
This is not a polished founder story. It is the setbacks people usually understand only after they have already lived them. If that timing call is the one you are sitting on, what actually changes at the Series A operating layer is the longer version.
Wednesday, October 7, 9:00 AM-12:00 PM: Investing in the Physical Future
Silicon Valley Bank, San Francisco. Investor panel at 10:10 AM, Q&A at 10:50 AM, networking from 11:00 AM.
Doors open at 9:00 AM for registration and networking. Plug and Play and SVB open the room at 10:00 AM. The investor panel starts at 10:10 AM.
AI is moving into robotics, mobility, energy, semiconductors, industrial systems, and hardware. Those companies do not raise, hire, or commercialize on a software clock. They need longer timelines, more capital, and a different path to a first customer who will pay.
Court joins Pae Wu of SOSV, Matt Rappaport of Future Frontier VC and the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator, and Raghu Madabushi of Samsung Catalyst Fund. Go if your round does not look like a software round.
Wednesday, October 7, 1:30-5:30 PM: GTM Unplugged LIVE
Wells Fargo Innovation Center, 1302 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. The afternoon opens at 1:30 PM.
Building the company and leading it at scale are not always the same job. This is the session if you can already feel the role you created getting smaller than the company.
Court Lorenzini and Guru Hariharan, Founder and Chairman of CommerceIQ, are part of the afternoon. Court stepped away from DocuSign. Guru stepped out of the CEO role at CommerceIQ. The conversation is the leadership, identity, and company dynamics under that change, and what to think about before the organization grows past the job you wrote for yourself.
The rest of GTM Unplugged LIVE is practical growth work for software companies: a panel at 2:15 PM, roundtables at 3:00 PM, and a reception at 4:00 PM. The room is at the Wells Fargo Innovation Center.
Join us during SF Tech Week
These sessions cover very different parts of the founder journey. A common thread runs through all of them: the decisions behind growth.
How do you earn trust before you have a major brand behind you? How do you know when the company is actually ready to scale? How does the playbook change when you are building something capital-intensive? And what happens when the business reaches a point where the founder's role needs to change too?
Those are the kinds of questions founders rarely solve from a playbook alone. They benefit from hearing how other founders approached them, what worked, what did not, and what they would do differently.
If you are at SF Tech Week, join us at one of the sessions above and come say hello.
If the decision you are carrying is not one of these five, bring that one instead. Talk with a Nexus Partner