Building a startup means making decisions before you have all the answers. 

When should you scale? How do you know you really have product-market fit? What does it take to land enterprise customers? How do you build the right team? And when you finally get in front of an investor, how do you make sure your pitch earns another conversation? 

On November 4 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 will bring together founders, investors, and operators who have tackled those questions from different sides of the table.

Hosted by TechCrunch in partnership with Fidelity Private Shares, the full-day event goes beyond fundraising and AI to explore the realities of finding customers, building teams, sharpening a pitch, developing founder leadership, and scaling companies both inside and outside traditional startup hubs. Save 25% on your ticket today, and bring a colleague along for free with our limited BOGO deal.

Boston founders do not have to look far for an example of what can happen when a startup finds its market and continues evolving with its customers. 

Steve Fredette, president, co-founder, and director of Toast, takes the Impact Stage for “Building a Company That Keeps Reinventing Itself.”

Toast’s story offers founders a compelling case study in identifying a customer problem, finding product-market fit, winning customers, and ultimately scaling a Boston startup into a public company.

But reaching scale does not mean the work is finished. Fredette’s conversation will look at what it takes to continue evolving a company as customer expectations, technology, and the market change around it, while staying connected to the needs that helped create the business in the first place.

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