Building Pricing Power in the Age of AI
A practical session for start-up founders and senior executives on differentiation, customer value, and pricing power.
On Tuesday, November 10, H/L Ventures, with support from our friends at Stifel Banking, will bring together a curated group of founders and senior leaders in Manhattan for a practical session with Ed Lee—pricing strategist, author, and H/L Ventures Expert-in-Residence.
Ed will share practical frameworks and real-world examples for connecting differentiation, customer value, positioning, packaging, and price. His talk will be followed by an extended Q&A and candid discussion among the founders and operators in the room.
The conversation will focus on three fundamental questions:
What truly differentiates our company?
What is that differentiation worth to our customers?
How do we communicate and monetize that value clearly and credibly?
Bring a live pricing or positioning challenge. Whether you are reconsidering your value metric, introducing AI into your product, facing pressure to discount, changing your packaging, or struggling to communicate why your solution commands its price, this session is designed to help you identify the next decision to test.
What you’ll take away
A sharper way to distinguish durable customer value from increasingly replicable features
A practical framework connecting positioning, packaging, and pricing
Better questions for evaluating willingness to pay
Specific next steps to test with customers and your leadership team
A complimentary Pricing Power Audit to help you identify where your company is gaining or losing pricing power and prioritize what to address next
Agenda
9:00 AM — Breakfast and arrival
9:30 AM — Pricing Strategy in the Age of AI with Ed Lee
A practical talk followed by an interactive exercise applying the ideas to attendees’ own pricing, positioning, and customer-value challenges.10:15 AM — Founder Q&A and candid discussion
11:00 AM — Formal program concludes
11:00–11:30 AM — Optional networking
There is no cost to attend this event, thanks to our sponsors and friends in the ecosystem.
Who should attend
This gathering is designed for founders and senior executives building venture-backed companies and navigating consequential decisions around growth, pricing, positioning, or monetization.
We expect the room to center on Series A companies while also including select Seed+ and Series B leaders for whom the conversation is particularly relevant. It will be valuable to CEOs, co-founders, and leaders responsible for product, revenue, go-to-market, strategy, or pricing.
The discussion will be vertical-agnostic, and your company does not need to be AI-native. The room will remain intentionally small to support a substantive and candid exchange across different business models.
About Ed Lee
Ed Lee is the founder and CEO of HelloAdvisr, where he advises venture-backed companies on pricing and monetization. He previously held leadership roles at Simon-Kucher and LG Electronics. He has taught entrepreneurship and pricing at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University and serves as a Resident Expert at the Oxford Saïd Entrepreneurship Centre. Ed is an Expert-in-Residence at H/L Ventures and the Oxford Entrepreneurship Centre. He is also the author of The Last Mile of Trust: How Great Companies Build Pricing Systems That Drive Unstoppable Growth.
Why H/L is opening the room
H/L Ventures is a New York City-based, multi-strategy venture capital firm investing in companies that create meaningful value for business, society, and the planet.
At H/L, our work is about helping founders succeed—not only through capital, but through practical expertise, trusted relationships, and a community willing to share what it has learned. We hope this gathering gives more founders access to those resources and to one another.
The event is being made possible because of the generous support from Stifel Banking, Hubspot for Startups, and AlleyCorp:
Stifel Financial Corp. (NYSE: SF) is a diversified global wealth management, investment banking, and commercial banking institution with $500 billion in assets under management. Stifel Bank, Member FDIC, provides venture and fund banking solutions to venture capital-backed companies and their investors: https://bankwithstifel.com/venture-banking/.
HubSpot for Startups helps startups build a scalable growth engine by bringing marketing, sales, and customer service together on HubSpot’s AI-powered customer platform. Trusted by more than 35,000 startups, the program gives eligible companies access to HubSpot software at startup-friendly pricing, along with specialized education, training, resources, and a founder community—all designed to help lean teams acquire and retain customers, streamline operations, and scale smarter.
AlleyCorp. Founded by long-time New York internet entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, AlleyCorp founds and invests in transformative companies in New York and across the world. Responsible for building and investing in some of the earliest and most iconic tech companies in New York, including MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB), Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Nomad Health, we are proud to sit at the center of a robust and growing tech ecosystem.
Attendance is limited to 40 guests. Please request a spot and wait to be admitted to the event; confirmations will be sent on a rolling basis.