At Early Stage, the first event of its kind from TechCrunch, entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds in the tech world across categories like fundraising, scaling, operations and marketing. Alongside these VCs, lawyers, growth marketers, operators and recruiters, we’ll also be hearing directly from entrepreneurs who have charted their own course.
One such entrepreneur is Mariam Naficy, founder and CEO of Minted. Naficy is an early trailblazer of the ecommerce and crowdsourcing spaces, and a serial entrepreneur to boot.
Minted started as a marketplace for unique paper stationary, all the way back in 2007. The vision was to build out a platform that crowdsourced incredible, unique design into a single marketplace, elevating beautiful products and amplifying independent designers. Today, Minted sells wall art, stationary and home goods, and also sources design for other retailers and brands.
Independent designers on the platform hail from all 50 states and more than 100 countries, and their products have made their way to more than 75 million homes worldwide. The company has raised nearly $300 million from investors Norwest Venture Partners, Benchmark, TCV, and Ridge Ventures.
At Early Stage, we’ll talk to Naficy about how she’s grown Minted over the years. From securing funding to using that funding, from scaling the community to scaling the team, everything is on the table.
Marketplaces are, historically speaking, incredibly hard to build, but Naficy is an expert on the subject. We’ll talk specifically about how to maintain that perfect balance between customer and creator all while growing at a rapid clip.
TC Early Stage (July 21 and 22) has so much to offer. The show will bring together 50+ experts across startup core competencies, such as fundraising, operations, and marketing. Cyan Bannister is set to explain how to get an investor to say yes to your startup. Asher Abramson will be sharing how to create growth assets for paid channels, lawyers James Alonso and Adam Zagaris will share how to draw up your first contracts, and Priti Choksi is hosting a session on how to get a company acquired rather than selling.
The two-day show features more than 50 sessions, but don’t worry; attendees will get access to the videos on demand for all of them. What’s more, most of the speakers, who happen to be investors, are participating in TechCrunch’s CrunchMatch, our platform that connects founders to investors based on shared interests.
Here’s the fine print. Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Buy your ticket today, and you can sign up for the breakouts we are announcing today, as well as those already published. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)
Get your TC Early Stage pass today and jump into the inside track on the sessions we announced so far, as well as the ones to be published in the coming weeks.
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