We held our first Founder Summit three years ago in San Francisco and the feedback from attendees was enormously positive. We knew we had to hold another.
One pandemic later, we finally held our second Founder Summit in Tel Aviv, and were overwhelmed with its success. We have a truly incredible group of founders, 75 of whom we were privileged to host for three days of knowledge sharing, discussion, learning and socialising. We believe that there are few better times to learn from others than in times of uncertainty. For a few days, we put conversations of markets to the side to discuss the principal focus of our founders: building enduring businesses.
Summit enables founders to step away from the day to day challenges of business building, and create space to consider things from new perspectives. It is an opportunity to meet, learn from, and problem solve with other founders from all across the world building businesses both similar and different.
We were joined by some incredible speakers, including:
- Experienced founders such as Avishai Avrahami, Micha Kaufman, Shai Winiger to learn from their experiences building Wix, Fiverr and Lemonade.
- Major General Elyezer Shkedi to learn about about building high accountability organisations through the development of a debriefing culture
- Paralympic champion rower Moran Samuel to enlighten us on resilience and renowned investigative journalist Ilana Dayan to share the art of story telling and fact finding
We’ve had some really valuable feedback from those who attended. One we particularly loved was from Atif Saad of Saasguru, who wrote two posts of learnings here and here. We love Atif’s generous words about Summit:
“Thank you Square Peg team for this beautiful gift of hope, inspiration and friendships. The event was flawless, and the learnings were immense. Every detail about the event was well thought out, and then some. The experiences and learnings in Israel have impacted me in a deep and meaningful way. I am a better founder, a better partner, a better father, and a better human being for it.
👉I re-learnt what it means to be a founder,
👉I learnt how to prioritise my family,
👉I learnt what dreaming big actually means,
👉I learnt a new definition of the word "conviction",
👉I learnt from you what world-class looks like when it comes to company culture,
👉👉and above all, I learnt that Amit and I are not alone as we take saasguru to new heights.”
Want to read more? You can find other founder posts and our team’s on our Linkedin.
We wanted founders to take away one specific learning they’ll leverage in their business in the next twelve months. While there were a huge variety of learnings shared, a few poignant ones kept coming up:
- Make hard decisions faster. A number of our speakers reflected on wishing they had made tough calls earlier, instead of putting them off for fear of the outcome or failure. Micha, co-founder of Fiverr, shared that he values velocity over process. He told our founders that doing things with high velocity means that you will make mistakes, and that they should take note of where they went wrong but keep moving.
- Be even more ambitious, especially with talent. Many founders reflected on the level of ambition displayed by our speakers, and the emphasis they placed on keeping their talent bars as high as possible. Paul Bassat reflected on the same in his opening session.
- Have a culture of debriefing (retrospectively reviewing what went right and wrong). Organisations and individuals can meaningfully increase their rate of learning by having a culture of debriefing. Having a culture of debriefing opens the door for constant reflection and self-iteration.
- Founders face similar challenges. Being a founder can feel like a lonely journey at times, and finding others who are experiencing similar problems can help founders better problem solve and understand that their problems are often not unique.
Where should we host Summit next? Our founders have suggested everywhere from Iceland to Buenos Aires!
