CEO Works Luncheon | A One Hour Tech Startup Bootcamp

This talk distills key lessons from Chris Rowen’s Startup Bootcamp, drawing on his experience founding and leading multiple successful startups and working closely with early-stage teams across technology domains. The session covers the essential realities of startups: why people start them, how to discover product-market fit, and the challenges of turning ideas into real products that customers value. It explores how founders engage customers, navigate venture funding, and build teams and cultures that can execute under uncertainty.

A special emphasis is placed on AI startups—where rapid technical progress is creating new opportunities, but also new risks. Rather than treating AI as a shortcut, this talk focuses on sound startup fundamentals, practical judgment, and how AI profoundly changes the economics of experimentation, iteration, scaling, and ultimately of the entire software ecosystem.

About the Presenter

Chris Rowen is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technologist, splitting his time between serving VP of Collaboration AI at Cisco and teaching about tech startups. Most recently he was co-founder and CEO of BabbleLabs, a speech ML company, acquired by Cisco in 2020. Prior to BabbleLabs, Chris served as CTO for Cadence’s IP Group, which he joined after Cadence’s acquisition of Tensilica, the company he founded in 1997 to develop extensible processors. He led Tensilica as CEO and later, CTO, to develop one of the most prolific embedded processor architectures, especially for compute-intensive embedded processing. Chris was a pioneer in developing RISC architecture and helped found MIPS Computer Systems in 1984. He has an MS and a PhD in EE from Stanford and a BA in physics from Harvard. He was named an IEEE Fellow in 2015 for his work in development of microprocessor technology.

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