At Startup Grind: Global Conference 2017

Exhausted from the sights and sounds from Pitch Bootcamp and Opening Night, but determined not to miss anything, we rolled out of bed and propelled ourselves into the car. At least that meant crossing the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge.

Day 1 marked the first official day of the conference with thousands of people from all over the world making their way to Redwood City, CA. It was overwhelming and incredibly humbling to be among them.

Since we had nothing officially scheduled for the day time, we decided to act like regular attendees and see a few speakers.

We watched Patrick Collison, Co-Founder and CEO of Stripe, talk about what it’s like to work with family.

We watched Shernaz Daver, CMO of Udacity and Executive Advisor of GV, talk about what’s important to focus on when starting a business.

We even watched Sean Rad, Founder of Tinder, talk about the path to his company’s success.

In between speakers, we checked out the startups that were exhibiting. Can you spot anything a little strange in the below photo?

Among our favorites was our BFF Avalow who we met at Pitch Bootcamp, who we talked about in our last post, a super cool medical hologram/augmented reality company called BioVirtua and another incredible company run by 18 year olds called Testify that gives teachers real-time insight into how students think and learn.

After this amazing and tiring day, as a member of the Top 50 companies we were invited to the Fox Club for a VIP mixer with free drinks galore.

This mixer was the start of a pub crawl that would take those who attended all over San Francisco to rub elbows with other founders, entrepreneurs, speakers and investors. With an incredibly early start the next day, we bid our goodbyes before the pub crawl began so we could take care of some final preparations and get a couple of hours of sleep.

Next up, we'll be talking about our Exhibition Day!

View all the posts about our journey here.