Kat Yalung is the Director of Bixel Exchange’s Startup LAunch Program, a Small Business Development Center (SBDC) in partnership with the Small Business Administration. Bixel Exchange is the Center of Innovation and Technology at the second largest Chamber of Commerce in the United States, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Bixel Exchange believes in an inclusive tech ecosystem reflected in Los Angeles’ workforce and entrepreneurs. She leads the development and implementation of Bixel Exchange’s core business advisory services, helping foster more than 250 tech startups each year as an impact driven incubator.

Each step-up in valuation requires pre-planning around sales and marketing investment being enough to hit required revenue targets

Rick Smith is a Co-Founder and Managing Director of CrossCut Ventures. CrossCut is an early-stage venture capital with over $200 million under management. Prior to co-founding CrossCut, Rick was a managing director at an early-stage venture capital firm based in Santa Monica, California, with over $500 million under management. Prior to that, he was a managing director at SunAmerica, Inc., where co-founded SunAmerica Ventures, a $750 million fund focused on both direct investments and investments in other venture funds. Rick began his career as a corporate attorney, working five years at the Los Angeles office of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy, a New York-based firm. He graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, with a degree in finance. He also graduated from Harvard Law School.

Christine Harada is President of i(x) investments. Ms. Harada has over 20 years of success in leading government and management consulting organizations. She previously served as the Federal Chief Sustainability Officer for the United States during the Obama administration. In this role, she provided oversight for all sustainability-related initiatives across the federal government in energy, fleet, and acquisitions-game-changing improvements that added to our nation’s clean energy future. She has extensive expertise in business strategy and translating that into operational excellence. Concurrently, she is a Fellow with the Los Angeles CleanTech Incubator. In addition, she is a member of the board of directors of Novume Solutions and the Millennium Institute. Ms. Harada holds an MA, International Studies and an MBA, Finance, respectively, from the Lauder Institute and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds an MS Aeronautics/Astronautics and a BS Aeronautics/Astronautics, respectively, from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Brandon Maier is the founder of Lvlup Ventures and has extensive experience building financial and marketing strategies for startup companies. Prior to launching Lvlup, Brandon was a Founder and Managing Partner of Quake Capital, an industry-leading accelerator and investment firm with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Austin. Under Brandon’s tenure and leadership at Quake, their portfolio companies raised over $100 million, including $25 million raised directly from Quake’s fund. Quake was named one of Forbes’ Top-Ten VCs and highlighted by CrunchBase for making the second-most investments in female-led startups (2018).

Matt is an experienced executive and advisor to companies across multiple industries. He coaches startups (early-to-growth stage) as a partner of Evolution Services Corp., a boutique executive coaching, leadership training and culture development firm. Matt also works specifically and extensively in the Los Angeles startup community as co-director of Startup Boost/Los Angeles, a startup pre-accelerator that educates, mentors and propels early stage companies.

While many view entrepreneurship as a dream career full of excitement, it is a real rocky road.

5 Entrepreneurs Share Their Best Advice On Facing The New Landscape Of Business

Melinda Moore is the Co-Founder of TuesdayNights. She is an entrepreneur, investor, advisor and global speaker with over 20 years of experience, and two exits (STV Communications and LovingEco). Melinda is the author of How to Raise Money: The Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding and has raised over 100 million via equity crowdfunding. She served as the Senior Vice President for Entertainment Media Ventures. Her work has been widely recognized by Digital LA (Top 50 Digital Women in 2015), the Green Business Bureau and the National Association of Women Business Owners’ Hall of Fame. Melinda serves on the Board of A Sense of Home and has a B.A. from UCLA.

Anna Barber is the Managing Director of Techstars LA and a partner in The Fund LA. She's a serial entrepreneur, former corporate lawyer, McKinsey consultant and lifelong New Yorker who is also firmly #LongLA.

As Principal at Sway Ventures, Brett Munster focuses most of his investment activities on the seed and earlier stages for the fund. In addition to evaluating new investments, Brett’s responsibilities include coordinating the due diligence process across all investment opportunities for the fund, monitoring performance of the fund and modeling portfolio allocation, and working directly with many of Sway’s existing portfolio companies. Prior to joining Sway Ventures, Brett ran day-to-day operations for a financial services company, where he oversaw a portfolio of distressed assets that grew to over $2 billion. Brett began his career at zAthlete.com, a sports social networking startup that he launched during his final semester at UC Berkeley and sold in 2009. Soon after, Brett launched his second start-up Visual Icon, a platform designed to help bring Hollywood content online. He also holds an MBA from the University of Southern California where his focus was on entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.

Patrick manages operations for 500 Startups’ multiple Venture Capital Unlocked programs in partnership with universities, governments, corporations, and other institutions. In this role he oversees program coordination; communication with partners; recruitment and vetting of participants; preparation; and best practice creation. He is experienced in investor/lender education, curriculum design, strategic planning, and program management. He has a MA in Global Finance, Trade, and Economic Integration and a BA in International Relations and Business Management and speaks Spanish and Senegalese Wolof.

Technology entrepreneur, executive, investor, and board member, Carey has started, grown and/or led nine B2B and consumer technology companies during startup and growth phases. He's held senior-level roles for companies that have collectively raised over $250M in venture capital and achieved $1B+ in enterprise value.

Every stage of funding for a startup requires a different set of metrics and milestones

SAFE stands for Simple Agreement for Future Equity. It was created by the team at Y Combinator and has been a popular method for investing at the earlier stage of a company.

There seem to be many founders who can’t launch because they don’t have the strong technical skills to build what they want to build and don’t know how to find a technical co-founder. So we wanted to offer some advice.

Find out about the Startup Playbook

Here we’ll be sharing a step-by-step guide for monetizing your freemium business - covering user segmentation and targeting, monetization campaign set-up and best practices, and model optimization. Now let’s get started!

Why does it all go wrong for so many startups?

Startups are defined by growth, but growth isn't step one in building a great company. If you focus on trying to grow before you make a product people love, you are unlikely to succeed.

The strength of great advisers is in their ability to think about new and complex ideas with a clear sense of their own subjectivity.

Using fundraising itself as a benchmark is dangerous for the entire community because it encourages a culture of optimizing for short term showmanship instead of making something people want and creating lasting value.

Learn about some mistakes founders make

Let's imagine that you are the founder of a company that has successfully raised an angel or institutional round and are currently in a situation where you have 12 months or less of runway.

One of the hardest questions to answer when considering an A is “when is my company ready?”

What should you do with too much advice?

To foster a scientific approach to growth, we've recently seen many companies break away from a strictly functional organizational design (with product, engineering, marketing, etc.) to create a cross-functional growth team.

There has probably been more capital looking to invest in private technology companies in the past five years than any five-year period before.

Learn more about how to distribute stock equity to your employees.

Taking an idea to market comes down to making not more than five to ten key decisions.