Is your website increasing your close rate or is it just a fancy brochure?
A website is arguably your most important sales and marketing asset. It works around the clock—nights, weekends, and holidays. But many websites don't pull their weight in the sales process. From lead generation to conversion, learn how your website can be your most powerful sales enablement tool. When built with revenue-generation as the primary goal, you won’t need to hire a huge sales team right away—you can let your website do the heavy lifting. Join 25-year industry veteran, Kitty Hart, for fresh takes on how to build a powerful, sales-focused website that drives growth for your business.

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

Artificial intelligence has become a buzz term shrouded in mystery and mystique behind what it's actually being used for. From how it can be helpful to where it can not only improve business outcomes but work alongside job functions and departments. We're taking a peek behind the curtain on where AI is already being implemented and how it can create value within your business.

You are an entrepreneur, CEO, CTO, solo dev, maker, shaker, or doer. You have 1,000 things you should be doing this very moment, but what is the right thing to focus on? That is the fundamental question behind growth hacking. Growth hacking is all about prioritizing your activities, measuring results, and taking effective action, which is much easier said than done. 

In this fast-paced participatory session, we will cover two critical tools to increase the growth of your business, the Idea Pipeline and ICE metrics. Originally developed by Sean Elis to bring explosive growth to Dropbox, LogMeIn, and many others, the Idea Pipeline and ICE metrics are simple but powerful tools to get your business focused and growing fast. Our speaker Brian Krohn, has implemented these methods for startups, corporations, non-profits, as well as his own businesses and personal projects.

Join us for a fast-paced overview of the necessary legal steps startups should take in order to be successful. Panelists from Fredrikson & Byron will cover the basics, providing attendees with answers to key questions they face when running a startup and answer questions like: 

•    Does entity choice matter, and why?

•    When raising money, what do you need to do to ensure you comply with securities laws??

•    What kinds of rights should I give investors? 

•    How do I decide who will be an employee and who will be a contractor?

 •    Why do I need to get IP assignments, and when?

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

Please register in advance for this meeting: Register here

Join us to hear fundraising best practices for early stage startups from an experienced VC sharing some tips and tricks. How to prepare and run your fundraising process? What's the best way to approach investors? How do you secure investment from out-of-town investors? Bring your questions!

Jen Labanowski, LMFT and Shelly Smith, LMFT are the co-founders of United Counseling and Wellness (ucwtherapy.com). As licensed systemic therapists, Jen and Shelly have an extensive background in helping individuals and systems increase their emotional and relational health. As co-founders themselves, Jen and Shelly know firsthand that "achieving wellness" is easier said than done when you're also trying to navigate the countless demands and stressors of scaling a business and leading a team. Jen and Shelly know that the health of a company is a direct reflection of the health of the founder and they are passionate about helping their fellow founders find increased balance and calm. This presentation will help founders learn strategies to improve communication, avoid burnout and lead from a place of emotional health.

Paving a Strategic ROADMAP™ to Success: The challenge of developing a simple, clear and effective business strategy. There is always more than one way to a destination.  Choosing the right strategic path for your business is a challenge. Strategic ROADMAP addresses the seven critical questions your strategies need to answer – in a simple, logical and memorable structure. The questions apply at the company, business unit or project level.  Equally they can be framed for core or disruptive business growth. This talk will explain developing your strategy using the Strategic ROADMAP.  It will discuss each of the 7 critical questions and provide a clear example using one of the most well-known, and maybe the only, success stories in the U.S. commercial airline business – Southwest Airlines.

An inside scoop from VCs on what's changed, and how to stand out

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 30 minute Q&A.

The ILT Academy delivers extensive educational experiences to cultivate problem solvers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. We empower problem solvers and innovators to rethink and redesign problems, solutions, customers, and context. We equip entrepreneurs with the skills needed to commercialize ideas, develop successful ventures, and create high-growth businesses.

Learn how career, top-level executive assistants integrate into their principal's lives to free up their time and increase their productivity.

Join us as we take our Pitch Night virtual! The Summer gBETA St. Thomas companies will each present a five-minute pitch followed by Q&A. Come prepared to learn all about these companies' innovative ideas and enter to win a variety of prizes!

Founders Live is an unforgettable happy hour competition where up to five companies pitch their business, but YOU decide who wins. 

Five handpicked companies take the hot seat, with only 99 seconds to pitch their company and describe their value proposition in front of an eager audience. After the pitches and audience Q&A, the crowd votes on a winner who will not only receive an award but recognition from the crowd and the opportunity to talk more about their product or service. It's like Shark Tank, but you decide who wins it all! 

What's in it for you? Bring your friends, co-workers, grab some food and drinks, get to know your local entrepreneurs, and vote for who you think will be the next big thing in Minneapolis! 

What's in it for the companies? We at the Founders Live Minneapolis team are excited to announce ALL presenting companies who are chosen to give their 99-second pitch at a Founders Live event receive $5,000 credit towards their web hosting on Amazon. "Amazon Web Services provides startups with low cost, easy to use infrastructure needed to scale and grow any size business. AWS Activate is a program designed to provide startups with resources they need to get started on AWS." The winner gets an extra $5,000 credits, bringing their total to $10,000! 

Pitch Applicants: We are currently accepting innovative pitch applications! 

This is an opportunity for your startup to gain more recognition in the Minneapolis startup community. Tell us your story--who you are and what you do. We'll send you more details and you may become one of the finalists who pitch.

Minnesota Innovates welcomes the Founders of five companies as they share insights and their experiences funding the growth of nationally and internationally successful companies.

When companies are small, customers often receive personal attention support. But what happens as a company grows? How can a business continue to serve and support their customers in a personal, but scalable, manner? Hear from some of today’s leading customer success executives on how their businesses are serving thousands of customers using data analytics, segmentation and specialists to deliver customer value.

Learn how to Achieve HIPAA Compliance for your Software Company Using Tools Provided by Major Cloud Platforms like AWS, Azure and GCP. We will briefly define the challenges you face to be HIPAA Compliant as well as the tools made available by common cloud providers. This is also relevant if you have other forms of compliance requirements, such as PCI or SOC 2.

While early stage healthcare companies may seek resources from established healthcare companies, they often want to remain independent while they pursue their healthcare-related vision and build value. 

Established healthcare companies expand and enhance existing product portfolios by acquiring early-stage technologies. They also want certainty that, if they help nurture an early-stage company, they will be able to acquire it once it is ready to exit without risk of being outbid by a competitor. 

To balance these issues, companies often use a structured acquisition, in which the established healthcare company invests in the early-stage company, often obtains some degree of commercial rights and negotiates an option to acquire the company at a pre-agreed price. Join attorneys from Fredrikson & Byron, P.A. as they explain the rationale for, structure of, and pros and cons of a structured acquisition.

80 hour work weeks. Double-booked meetings. Late night phone calls. More than ever, it seems like the norm is to be working out of a space of busyness and overwhelm. Being under constant stress not only makes us less productive, effective and creative, but it can also lead to burnout. In this workshop, you'll learn about what burnout is and what causes it. More importantly, you'll walk away knowing that you don't need to sacrifice your health and run yourself ragged in order to achieve professional success. It's not only possible to integrate your work with self-care, but it's essential in order to be at your best every day.

Join us for this panel discussion with youth CEO's that are building the future of hospitals, Government and non-profit leadership building the world's fair for 2027 around health, Mayo Hospitals, and AI tech entrepreneur's.  They will each share their experiences with how the future of our hospitals and health care systems will be changed through the innovations they are helping bring to the world.  Understand through this how youth are engaged to solve problems in new and innovative ways and leveraging design thinking.

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

Kendall Qualls will discuss his early life in poverty and a broken home, career in the healthcare industry, and experience launching a data analytics and artificial intelligence startup to help cancer patients. Kendall will also discuss how we can promote entrepreneurship through our regulatory environment, cultural values, and education system. 

To all the parents out there who are working and teaching at home in a pandemic: you are not alone. This. is. so. hard.

Even though we haven't found one magic solution to make parenting in a pandemic easy, some psychologist colleagues and I have gathered some ideas about what might make parenting just a tiny bit easier for you. Join me to review some bigger goals and some specific strategies to help with parenting--with a focus on elementary school age kids--during this challenging time.

Taxpayer investments (non-dilutive funding) is critical to startups in the technology commercialization arena!  In this two hour session, you will learn the basics of the annual federal $3.7B Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs; two sources of non-dilutive funding to move from the lab to the marketplace.  This is an ideal session for scientists, engineers, innovators with novel ideas, concepts, and projects that possess strong commercial or societal potential, domestically, and internationally. 

Join Michael Gietl, Industry Executive - Healthcare, J.P. Morgan Securities and Shaye Mandle, President and CEO of Medical Alley, as they discuss trends in medtech and healthcare — plus, how to fundraise during COVID-19.

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

Designing  your new medical device or system is challenging all by itself. In today's rapidly changing world, connecting that device to the larger medical infrastructure may be a critical part of your success. We will discuss the importance of developing and implementing an integrated connectivity strategy as part of your start-up plan.

Digital health solutions enable physicians to monitor chronic conditions remotely, increase patient compliance, and enable us to move healthcare out of the clinic and into the home. A panel of digital health investors and entrepreneurs will gather to discuss the challenges and the opportunities with digital health and what is next for healthcare. Hosted by Nextern.

A chance visit to a relative in the hospital left Chloe Alpert fascinated by the amount of medical supplies wasted. At this session, join Chloe, Founder of Medinas Health, and Charles Hudson, Managing Partner of Precursor Ventures as they discuss how she used her skills as a serial entrepreneur to launch Medinas Health and disrupt the $250B medical supply industry.

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

While COVID is a biggest issue of today, its death toll pales by comparison to Heart Disease, Diabetes, Cancer and countless diseases caused by food. The entrepreneurs in this session tell the tale of two battles: just being entrepreneurs and fighting the unpopular fight of nutrition in a world with adverse interests to health. Over $3 trillion is spend in “sick care”, caused by unhealthy food. Imagine what we could do with that money and how the affected people would thrive in absence of those diseases. We’ll explore the issues, uncover the dichotomies, tell of trials, tribulations and triumphs, and pose solutions to the gargantuan problems of wellness and wellcare.

The microscope on the structural and systemic issues that have been laid bare and/or exacerbated by the realities of COVID and racial inequity have never been more important in our communities or in our healthcare system. Join us for a panel discussion to hear about strategies, challenges and innovations from policy, payor, provider, and community perspectives. Opportunities for entrepreneurs exist as vendors and service providers, changemakers, and community supporters. Connecting entrepreneurs to the accelerator and investment community will be critical to driving change, increasing equity and expanding opportunity along the way.

BetterYou's Hayley Kraft will interview CEO Sean Higgins about where our time has been going the past few months, and what that data means for our overall health. Sean will also cover ways to make your screen time work for you.

Celebrating Minority Owned Businesses in Minnesota

We live in a rapidly changing world and cannot rely on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. We have our tools ready to aid us. However, unfamiliar situations will come up, and to survive we will need to drop our familiar tools.

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

Victor Hugo, the renowned French writer, famously said: "There Is one thing stronger than all the armies In the world, and that Is an Idea whose time has come.”  

This is a rapid fire, engaging session to bring intellectual property (IP) principles out of the legal stratosphere down to the level of the fired up entrepreneur looking to blaze a trail into the future.

We'll explore at least 5 insider secrets about IP law that can fuel greater enthusiasm of your investors, team members, and customers as you build lasting businesses with greater differentiation, profit margins, and exit potential.

Learn how patents actually do encourage innovation from you and your team.

Learn how the classic boy-meets-girl romance can improve your understanding of patent law.

Learn how to go from patent filing to patenthood in 6 months or less.

These and other insights will leave you with a new sense of possibility for leveraging IP to supercharge your business results.

This conversation will focus on the founder experience, trends in FemTech, funding challenges and the future of this space. Interested in launching a FemTech startup? Get advice!

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a Happy HALF Hour of Q&A.

Join the speakers of FemTech, Female Founders, and the Future for a Happy HALF Hour of Q&A.

Mix up your favorite cocktail and join the speakers of the FemTech Panel for Q&A!

Learn about Cardio Active and why we are the new way to work out.

Cardio Active is private, by design. That means no online account creation, none of your workout or fitness data floating around in the cloud, and you're fully in control of your data. In this digital age, we believe everyone should be able to work out with technology without sacrificing their data or privacy. That's why we made Cardio Active.
Check us out on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cardio-active/id1488124050
Join the conversation on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-NnliccQn/

Join us for a panel discussion to listen and learn from three social enterprise founders their lessons on bruising shins, empathy and humility, and harnessing the power of outcomes and impact and the value it provides in ops, strategy, and marketing & communications.

Join the Minnesota startup community as we present live pitches from 18 of the top businesses that emerged from the 2020 MN Cup competition season. They're vying for a share of $500,000 in prize money that will be awarded live during the event. You won't want to miss this!

MN Cup is a startup competition for early-stage companies hailing from anywhere in Minnesota. Thanks to an incredible group of sponsors and the time and talents of our volunteer mentors and judges, we are able to offer all programming and prize money completely free for participants. We take no equity in exchange for the seed capital we award, and are here to connect Minnesota founders to the education, resources and capital they need to build and scale successful companies.

Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-16th-mn-cup-final-award-ceremony-tickets-117138096199?aff=TCSW

During this pandemic, we hear the refrain over and over “I can’t wait to get back to normal.”  There is an honest and earnest feeling behind that sentiment, however, we have been asking ourselves - is “normal” what we want to get back to? In many ways our past “normal” was not nearly good enough and even exasperated many of the problems we are facing during this pandemic.  In this session we’ll outline some of those not-so-good “normals,” how they put us in a worse situation relative to an international crisis and how we have the opportunity to “get back to better” through acknowledging the bad, identify technology and non-technological solutions to address a better tomorrow by making our cities smarter and more responsive to our communities. “Smart North” is a collaboration of people working in and around smart city development thinking deeply around how our cities and communities can better work together and more efficient in building a better normal.

COVID 19 has further exposed the catastrophic
gaps in equity to digital access that in
turn impact access to healthcare, education,
employment among-st many others. In this session
we will explore the role of 5G in making this a reality.

The Twin Cities have come together to build smart and sustainable collaboration centers to foster entrepreneurial-ism and innovation around energy solutions that deliver resiliency, minimize climate impact and assure healthy sustainable working environments. Join entrepreneurs and sustainability leaders from the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as they share how their city plans, development and implementation have leveraged smart, sustainable technologies for climate and human livelihood.

The Midway area of St. Paul has a rich history, combined with the diverse surrounding communities, aging infrastructure, and the busiest intersection in the state (at Snelling & University). Many stakeholders have been working to create a more resilient and vibrant community in Midtown, in addition to heightened near-term demand from 2020 COVID-19 and social justice unrest along University Avenue. Minnesota entrepreneurs bring a wealth of offerings to the equation, leveraging connected technology and data to help (re)build a better community.

Lean about the impactful work Marcus Kar is leading in North Minneapolis and then join a discussion with Jonathan Banks in the Community Lounge.

What is Food Justice? What is a Food Desert? What are the calls to act?

A complex patchwork of federal, state and even local employment laws applies to startups and emerging companies. While early stage companies are focused on growing revenue and visibility, increasing headcounts, and securing funding and new investors, they are not immune from these laws. In fact, non-compliance exposes even the smallest employers to serious consequences such as audits, litigation, and investor trepidation, and can delay or derail acquisitions or other critical transactions.