Builders Stage agenda revealed: Practical strategies for scaling startups at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
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- TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 will host the Builders Stage at Moscone Center in San Francisco on October 13-15, expecting more than 10,000 founders, investors, and operators, with early-bird registration saving up to $330.
- Google VP of Product Robby Stein headlines "From MVP to Billions of Users," a fireside on how product decision-making changes at billion-user scale, balancing speed with trust and innovation with reliability.
- OpenAI and Anthropic competitive threat is the focus of "What Happens When OpenAI Ships Your Roadmap" with Airbyte CEO Michel Tricot, Radical Ventures partner Rob Toews, and Webflow CEO Linda Tong exploring where defensibility exists when frontier labs launch competing products.
- Series A in 2027 gets its own session with Index Ventures' Jahanvi Sardana, Peak XV's Shailendra Singh, and Bessemer's Janelle Teng Wade breaking down what "fundable" will mean as VCs grow more demanding.
- Gusto CEO Josh Reeves leads "Hiring When AI Is a Co-Founder," examining how AI agents are rewriting early-stage team composition across engineering, support, and operations.
- Coinbase's Aklil Ibssa joins M13's Karl Alomar and Mignano Law Group's Lindsey Mignano for "M&A Is Now an Early-Stage Strategy," reframing acquisition-readiness as a day-one founder priority rather than a late-stage exit.
- Lovable CRO Ryan Meadows and Theory Ventures founder Tomasz Tunguz break down the compressed "90-Day GTM" from $0 to $10M ARR, which they call the new early-stage baseline driven by AI-enabled execution.
Why it matters: Three separate Builders Stage sessions are explicitly built around AI as existential challenge — competing with OpenAI, hiring AI as a co-founder, and orchestrating across multiple models — making AI anxiety the dominant lens through which 2026 founders are being told to plan fundraising, hiring, and GTM. For early-stage founders, the agenda doubles as a signal of which questions top VCs from Index, Bessemer, Peak XV, and General Catalyst will probe in the next funding cycle.
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