TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Agenda
Stages
Three jam-packed days featuring 200+ sessions across six stages, led by 250+ tech leaders shaping the industry today, only at Disrupt 2026.
On the Disrupt Stage, hear the big-picture conversations shaping what’s next in AI, venture, and global tech. Plus, watch Startup Battlefield 200 reveal the breakout startups as top investors judge the breakout startups competing live onstage.
Builders Stage delivers tactical advice for founders navigating fundraising, hiring, product-market fit, and scaling.
On the AI Stage, presented by Google Cloud, explore how AI agents and generative AI are rewriting SaaS, enterprise workflows, software pricing, and security.
The Smart Money Stage explores the future of fintech through discussions on payments infrastructure, embedded finance, stablecoins, and fraud prevention.
On the Smart Systems Stage, infrastructure takes center stage as experts discuss the AI datacenter boom, energy scalability, automation, robotics, and climate systems.
The AI in the Real World Stage examines how AI moves from demos to deployment across robotics, manufacturing, defense, and industrial operations.
Agenda Lineup
New sessions are added regularly. Check back in to explore more sessions.
October 13th
The Future of Money Movement: Stablecoins, Instant Payments & What's Next
Stablecoins and instant payments are changing how money moves around the world. This session looks at how these new payment systems compare to traditional banking infrastructure, where FedNow and private networks fit in, and what regulatory and market changes could shape the future of payments. Hear where these new systems are gaining traction, and where challenges remain.
Hiring, Compensation and Culture in the Most Competitive Market Ever
No question about it, the growth of AI startups has made hiring and retention for all tech companies more difficult. From competing for AI talent to secondary sales, founders are rethinking the human infrastructure of their startups. As hiring, incentives, and employee expectations rapidly evolve, this session explores how companies are adapting compensation, culture, and team building strategies to attract and retain top talent in a fundamentally changed startup environment.
AI, Trust & Verification in Financial Services
As AI moves beyond generating content and begins taking action, financial companies are rethinking trust, oversight, and security. Panelists explore how AI agents are changing financial workflows, why transparency and human judgment still matter, and how companies are approaching privacy, fraud prevention, and identity verification in an AI-powered world.
What Happens When OpenAI Ships Your Roadmap
Nearly all AI founders have the same worry these days: what if OpenAI or Anthropic launch a product that competes with mine? Even strong products are at risk of becoming features of the larger players. This session explores where defensibility exists, and what founders can do if they do face competition from rapidly evolving AI giants.
Building the Infrastructure for Global Commerce
Traditional financial systems weren’t built for today’s global businesses. Airwallex, recently valued at $8 billion, is helping companies move money across borders, manage global finances, and embed financial services into their products. Founder and CEO Jack Zhang shares how modern businesses are rethinking payments, and what it takes to build the infrastructure powering global commerce.
PMF Red Flags: How to Tell If You Really Have It
In an AI hype cycle, product market fit signals are easier to fake and harder to trust. Founders are mistaking early excitement, usage spikes, and pilot wins for durable traction. This session breaks down what false PMF actually looks like, how investors and operators separate real retention from hype driven adoption, and the signals that indicate whether a company has true pull or just temporary momentum.
Bringing Fusion to the Grid
For decades, fusion has been the energy technology of the future. Now, advances in science, engineering, and private investment are bringing commercial fusion closer to reality. In this session, leaders from Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion discuss the breakthroughs driving the industry forward, the challenges that remain, and what it will take to bring fusion power to the grid at scale.
From MVP to Billions of Users: How Product Decisions Must Change at Scale
The instincts that win when building your first minimum viable product can break you at a billion-user scale. In this fireside, Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google, shares how product decision making changes when every update impacts billions of users. Hear how teams balance speed with trust, and innovation with reliability, at one of the world’s largest product organizations.
How Twilio’s Founder is Tackling the Power Problem
Inertia Enterprises CEO Jeff Lawson joins us for a candid fireside chat about his journey from founding Twilio to leading one of the world’s best funded fusion power startups. Hear what it will take to get fusion power out of the lab and onto the grid, and how his experience scaling Twilio is informing the Inertia’s approach to talent, timelines, and the hard engineering questions ahead.
Hiring When AI Is a Co-Founder
Early-stage companies are no longer just building with AI, they’re hiring it. As AI agents take on engineering, support, and operations, the definition of an early team is being rewritten. This session explores how founders decide what humans should own versus what gets delegated to AI, and how high-growth startups are building hybrid teams without losing speed, accountability, or culture.
Beyond Screens
For decades, humans have adapted to computers. Max Hodak believes the next era of technology will adapt to us. From brain-computer interfaces to entirely new ways of interacting with machines, join one of Silicon Valley’s most ambitious founders for a look at the future of computing—and humanity’s place within it.
October 14th
The Zero-to-1K Playbook: How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers Without a Marketing Budget
Early customer acquisition is not about marketing spend, it’s about founder led distribution and relentless execution. Most startups at zero to one do not have budget, brand, or scale, only urgency and creativity. This session breaks down how founders are landing their first customers through community building, product led growth, founder led sales, strategic outbound, and word of mouth momentum.
The Series A in 2027
Series A is getting harder, with VCs growing more demanding. For founders planning to raise in the next 1–2 years, this session breaks down what “fundable” will actually mean in 2027. Hear how top investors are redefining the metrics, teams, and traction that matter now, what outdated fundraising playbooks no longer work, and how companies can separate from the pack in the next funding cycle.
AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Public Safety
As AI moves from the cloud into the real world, few companies sit at the center of the debate quite like Flock Safety. Join founder and CEO Garrett Langley for a conversation about privacy, security, public safety, and the difficult tradeoffs that emerge when AI becomes part of the infrastructure of everyday life.
So You’ve Got a Hit Product. How Does Your Company Do It Again?
Most startups stall out because they build a single great product instead of a repeatable multi-product engine. Join a venture capitalist and two founders as they reveal the precise operational playbook for capital allocation, systemizing internal innovation, and engineering a compounding “Second Act” before the core product’s growth curve flattens.
How to Win When You're Not Building AI
AI may dominate the world of venture, but many enduring companies won’t be those that sell AI models or agents. This session is for founders competing for attention in an AI-obsessed market. Panelists break down what actually matters now: efficient growth, retention, revenue quality, and disciplined execution, and why fundamentals, not hype, still build breakout businesses.
The real Tokenmaxxing: How the Best AI Companies Navigate a Multi-Model World
The frontier is moving faster than any single model can keep up with, and the teams building the most successful AI products are increasingly orchestrating across many models rather than betting on just one. This panel brings together founders and operators at the center of that shift to discuss how they evaluate new models, manage cost and reliability at scale, and architect products that can evolve as quickly as the underlying technology.
What We Believe Now
Benchmark has backed some of the most iconic technology companies of the last three decades. For the first time on the Disrupt stage in San Francisco, all five Benchmark partners come together to debate where the next generation of startups will come from, what founders are getting wrong, and the opportunities they believe are still hiding in plain sight.
October 15th
Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model
Is the SaaS playook dead, or is it just evolving? This session brings together founders and platform leaders who are grappling with that question in real time – and coming away with real answers. Walk away with a sharper understanding of how to price AI products sustainably, how to build defensible moats when models are commoditizing, and how to make SaaS work in the AI era.
Yes, It’s Hard to be a Founder: an Honest Conversation
Company building is as psychologically demanding as it is strategic, and most founder narratives understate that reality. In this candid conversation, founders and experts unpack the hidden costs of high growth environments, from burnout and decision fatigue to the identity strain of sustained pressure, and share the systems, habits, and mental frameworks that help leaders endure and perform at a high level.
M&A Is Now an Early-Stage Strategy
The smartest founders today aren’t just building for IPOs, they’re also building for possible acquisitions in mind from day one. As exits shift and capital tightens, understanding M&A early has become a competitive advantage. This session breaks down how founders can create the possibility of such an option through product strategy and partnerships. It delves into how big-dollar startup outcomes actually happen, even for small companies.
The Video Intelligence Race: Real-Time, Reasoning, and What Comes Next
Visual AI isn’t just about attention-getting videos anymore. The race has moved to real-time inference, physical reasoning, and AI models that genuinely understand the world they’re rendering. This session brings together the founders building at the frontier to talk about what happens when the technology crosses from generation into intelligence.
How To Create Viral Growth and Capitalize On It
Startups can go from zero to viral overnight, but sustaining that momentum is a completely different challenge. In this fireside, Zach Yadegari shares how Cal AI navigated rapid growth, product pressure, and the realities of building in a distribution driven market. Hear the lessons behind turning breakout attention into durable retention and long term company building.
Startup Battlefield Alumni Update
The 90-Day GTM: Why $0–$10M ARR Is the New Baseline (And How to Actually Get There)
The definition of traction has changed. What once took years is now expected in months, and $0–$10M ARR is increasingly becoming the new early stage baseline. This session breaks down how AI enabled execution, faster distribution, and shifting investor expectations are compressing GTM timelines, and the tactical levers founders need in the first 90 days to accelerate revenue and stand out fast.
Winning Pre-Seed Without a Product
Founders are increasingly expected to compete for capital before they even have a product. At the pre-seed stage, investors are betting on story, conviction, and founder-market fit. This session breaks down how to build credibility before revenue exists so investors will cut that first check.
The Enterprise Isn't Broken. Your Assumptions About It Are.
AI is running inside the most sensitive enterprise systems in the world, making autonomous decisions at a speed and scale that traditional security frameworks were never designed to handle. This session delivers the infrastructure-level view of what enterprise AI security actually requires in 2026, from observability and governance to the architectural principles that separate deployments enterprises can trust from ones they cannot afford to touch.
Building the AI Workforce
From law firms to Fortune 500 companies, AI is rapidly changing how knowledge work gets done. Harvey has emerged as one of the breakout enterprise AI companies of the last two years. Join co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg for a conversation about how AI is reshaping professional services, what enterprises actually want from AI, and what happens when software starts doing work once reserved for highly trained experts.
Securing the AI Enterprise: Why the Cloud Just Got a Lot More Complicated
AI is running inside the most sensitive enterprise systems in the world, making autonomous decisions at a speed and scale that traditional security frameworks were never designed to handle. This session delivers the infrastructure-level view of what enterprise AI security actually requires in 2026, from observability and governance to the architectural principles that separate deployments enterprises can trust from ones they cannot afford to touch.
The High-Conviction Filter: What We Learned from the Battlefield
What separated the breakout companies from the rest at Disrupt 2026? In this candid debrief, Battlefield judges unpack the trends and founder qualities that stood out in real time, from shifting investor expectations to the narratives that resonated most this year. The conversation will also explore how startup storytelling is evolving and what happens after the spotlight, including the realities of maintaining momentum and surviving the critical 12 months after a major launch, funding round, or Battlefield appearance.
Everyone Can Build Software Now. What Happens Next?
AI is making it possible for millions of people to create software for the first time. Replit sits at the center of that shift. Join founder and CEO Amjad Masad for a conversation about the future of programming, entrepreneurship, and what happens when anyone can turn an idea into a product.
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