Welcome to SCALE

Having invested in over 100 startups, I’m always concerned when founders spend their time going to conferences. Most conferences are designed for some combination of schmoozing and panels of CEOs debating three or four inane questions provided by a subpar moderator.

My advice to founders has been: “Let’s not waste time and money on conferences until our startup is scaling.”

That’s when it hit me, no one is doing a conference about SCALING your company!!!

[ Click to Tweet (can edit before sending): https://ctt.ec/0bZua ]

So, last year I invited 900 founders to SCALE to learn, in detail, what they could do to grow their company. It was a huge success. In fact, many of the founders of my portfolio companies told me it was the best two days they spent all year.

We’re doing SCALE again this year, October 13-14 in San Francisco, and I’m inviting you to come!

If you are the founder of a company and you don’t have the money to attend, you can apply for a free ticket here. Like all of our events, we give 80% of the tickets to founders for free. Yes, free. We just ask that you fill out a questionnaire which helps us, you guessed it, convince sponsors to help us put on the show.

1. Free tickets for founders (with questionnaire)
2. Paid for everyone else (service providers, VCs, big companies, etc.)
3. Speaker proposals are being accepted

Every single speaker who makes it to the SCALE stage has to come to mandatory rehearsals with me, and if their presentation doesn’t hit our standards for being worth it for our founders, we don’t let them on stage. We require that our sponsors come to rehearsals as well!

Last year we asked our audience to rate the 54 speakers and we ranked them. The top 25 speakers are listed below in order (we won’t disclose the rankings of those numbered 26 to 54 -- though we did send them their scores!).

Fascinatingly, five of the top 25 speakers (including #1!) were sponsors who really thought about how they could teach our founders something important. So, when Des Traynor from Intercom talked about maintaining product market fit and knowing when to kill a feature, and Paul Midgen explained how Message Bus decided to pivot based on five key guidelines, people got massive value.

Additionally, eight of the top 25 were from my portfolio of angel investments. When Tawheed Kader of Tout revealed a strategic 5x5 method to get people to open and respond to cold emails, and Marco Zappacosta dissected the rocketship growth of Thumbtack, people LOVED it!

This makes sense since I only invest in companies with exceptional execution, and because the founders I partner with always work hard to support my events! :-)

Our goal is make SCALE so good that if you STOP working on your startup for two days it will be worth it! That’s a massively high benchmark, but I can tell you that we hit it last year. I flew in my entire team from Inside.com to attend the event and learn how we could grow our product.

Important Notes:

1. There is no live stream
2. Videos from the event will not be shared
3. No press allowed

The knowledge shared at the event is designed for those individuals who take the time to attend.

all the best, @jason

1. Top 25 Speakers - SCALE Conference 2014

   1. Des Traynor, Intercom [ Partner ]
   2. Jared Fliesler, Matrix Partners
   3. Danae Ringelmann, Indiegogo
   4. Steve Huffman, Reddit / Hipmunk
   5. Josh Elman, Greylock / Twitter
   6. Aaron Magness, Betabrand
   7. Tawheed Kader, Tout [ Jason’s Portfolio  ]
   8. Marco Zappacosta, Thumbtack [ Jason’s Portfolio  ]
   9. Craig Zingerline, Red Tricycle [ Jason’s Portfolio  ]
   10. Paul Midgen, Message Bus [ Partner ]
   11. Sahil Jain, AdStage [ Jason’s Portfolio  ]
   12. Erran Berger, LinkedIn
   13. Jeff Smith, Smule
   14. Farhan Thawar, Pivotal [ Partner ]
   15. Jay Simons, Atlassian [ Partner ]
   16. Justin Butler, Misfit Wearables
   17. Amy Bohutinsky, Zillow
   18. Marshall Kirkpatrick, Littlebird [ Jason’s Portfolio  ]
   19. Anand Kulkari, LeadGenius [ Partner & Jason’s Portfolio ]
   20. Sarah Leary, Nextdoor
   21. Arjun Naskar, Homejoy
   22. Maren Kate Donovan, Zirtual [ Jason’s Portfolio  ]
   23. Chris Depatria, Signpost [ Jason’s Portfolio  ]
   24. Devin Pooley, IFTTT
   25. Michael Stoppelmann, Yelp