Vertex Intersect 2024 in review: Key insights for founders, CEOs, and startup leaders
Published in
2 min readApr 9, 2024
Back in March, Vertex Ventures US hosted Vertex Intersect 2024, our annual gathering of founders, CEOs, investors, and technologists in Palo Alto, CA.
Intersect was a packed day of fireside chats and interactive roundtable sessions, as leaders from across the startup ecosystem shared their knowledge and operational wisdom with attendees. We want to share a big thank-you to everyone who helped make the event such a success.
As we reflect on the great conversations and key insights from Intersect, we’ve been recapping some highlights here on our blog:
- An overview of what we took away from Vertex Intersect ’24, with a focus on how the ability to communicate has emerged as a competitive advantage for startups and their leaders.
- Cyberhaven CEO Howard Ting laid out his 3 rules for startup founders hiring their first executive team — including the sage advice to backchannel your backchannel to make sure you’re getting the most impartial feedback possible.
- Hasura CEO and co-founder Tanmai Gopal and HashiCorp CTO and co-founder Armon Dadgar shared their experiences in building open source communities that helped support their startup journey towards growth.
- Yvonne Wassenaar, board member at companies including Rubrik and JFrog, shared her secrets for maintaining company culture even as your startup grows.
- Wealthfront chairman and founder Andy Rachleff explained what startups get wrong about product-market fit (and he should know, as he coined the term).
- Walter Pritchard of Palo Alto Networks and James Kim and Michael Hughes of Qatalyst Partners shared their tips on how founders can control their destiny and get a better M&A outcome.
- Rob Bearden, founder of Hortonworks and CEO of Sema4.ai, gave his advice to CEOs for upping their leadership game by getting alignment across the entire company.
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