Founders & Advisors Roundtable: What Actually Matters in the Early Days
Most early-stage founders are surrounded by advice — but it’s not always clear what truly moves the company forward.
This is an intimate, small-group roundtable bringing founders and experienced advisors together to share real lessons from building in the first 0–24 months. We’ll talk openly about traction, hiring, product decisions, fundraising, and the realities behind the highlight reel.
Our mentors
Darwin is a serial entrepreneur and an experienced executive with over 20 years of experience in building technology companies in Silicon Valley and Asia.
His career started with Fair Isaac company building the industry standard FICO credit bureau score, and later served as Senior Marketing Scientist for Digital Impact which went public on Nasdaq. He also led the development of the first credit bureau score for TransUnion in Asia. Later he founded/seeded several technology companies including 51credit Corp which was merged into a public company that went IPO on Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2017.
Darwin's current adventure BON Credit is developing the best AI agents for the consumer credit management. Darwin has graduate degrees from both UC Berkeley and Stanford.
Sandy Yu spent over two decades leading go-to-market teams at PwC, Cisco, and Oracle before founding RevenueCCO, an advisory practice that helps software companies unlock revenue from their existing customer base.
Having worked both inside global tech companies and as a founder, Sandy brings a blend of enterprise rigor and founder empathy. She mentors early-stage founders on go-to-market strategy, customer monetization, and the revenue fundamentals that help companies scale.
She is the creator of the Farm to Scale Operating System and works with founders and CEOs across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Abhishek Dubey is the Co-founder & CEO of Bolster.ai, an AI-powered enterprise security platform protecting companies from digital threats. He has raised $40M from investors including Microsoft’s M12 and scaled the company to 200+ enterprise customers, including Fortune 500 companies.
Previously, he was a Senior Engineering Leader at Cisco’s TALOS Security Business Group, leading a team of 50+ ML researchers and security engineers. He holds an MS in Information Security Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and completed executive education at Stanford University.
Abhishek is also the author of a book on Android security, holds four U.S. patents, hosts The RISE Podcast, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Council.
EchoHer is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering women and non-binary founders and funders by increasing their representation and success in entrepreneurship. We foster a supportive ecosystem that drives meaningful change and creates impactful opportunities through monthly events, co-working opportunities, curated networking sessions, pitch nights, and insightful panel discussions.