Call For Speakers: Submit Your Proposal by Friday, June 21
At this year’s Lean Startup Conference, we’ll be rolling up our sleeves and getting creative. For three days in October, we’ll be turning the Palace of Fine Arts into our sandbox—teaching and learning together about practical, tangible ways to help turn business ideas into reality.
What We’re Looking For
We’re seeking dynamic speakers who can share real-life examples of Lean Startup in action. This year’s program will be jam-packed with interactive breakout sessions that offer tools, techniques, and tactical approaches to solving real problems.
Whether you’re from a scrappy startup or a global enterprise, a small faith-based organization or a massive government agency, we want to hear from you. We place a huge amount of value on diversity at our conference and so we encourage people of all genders, races, ages and ethnicities to apply to speak.
What to Share
The Lean Startup stage is not a place to sell your product or service. It’s a place to share lessons learned from the trenches of entrepreneurship and an opportunity to be transparent about the challenges you’ve faced along the way. Speaking at the Lean Startup Conference is both exciting and rewarding and it means sharing the stage with renowned and emerging industry leaders from all over the world.
How to Get Started
You can submit a proposal to speak at the conference by filling out this form. There are a limited number of speaking slots available so here are some things to keep in mind when preparing your submission:
- Your topic should be educational, not a sales pitch. Speak to a problem or challenge that entrepreneurs and/or executives encounter in their work and, where possible, offer up strategies and tools that they can bring home with them.
- We hand-select most of our mainstage speakers. You’re far more likely to be accepted to speak if your topic can be presented in one of the following formats:
Session Type | Length | Description |
| Hands-On Workshops | 75-90 minutes | These sessions involve a mix of lecture, discussion, and exercises. Workshops should be highly interactive and offer actionable tools to help participants address a specific challenge. (Ex. Mastering Experiment Design) |
| Case Study | 60 minutes | Highlights a real-life situation or problem that can be analyzed and used for discussion and learning. (Ex. False Start: Learning from Entrepreneurial Failure) |
| Ignite Talk | 5 minutes | These talks are ideal for illustrating a big idea, a series of lessons learned, or a compelling story. Speakers get 5 minutes on stage and must use 20 slides with each slide advancing automatically after 15 seconds. (Ex. Ignite Talks) |
The Call for Speakers deadline is Friday, June 21. We’ll do our best to notify you on the status of your submission by mid-July. If you have any questions, please contact Jenna Elkins at [email protected].
Need Inspiration?
We’ve been out talking with our customers about their current challenges and here’s what Lean Startup Conference attendees are interested in tackling this year:
Practical strategies and tools for how to:
- Design experiments to test your riskiest assumptions
- Identify actionable metrics
- Define your customer problem
- Validate your business model
- Collect and manage data effectively
- Measure innovation
- Build and coach successful Lean teams
- Create startup conditions in large organizations
Have an idea to share? Make sure to send in your application to speak at the conference by Friday, June 21.