Growing Pains: Founder Panel (ProperRoom NYC · Series A+)
An invitation-only panel for Series A founders, growth-stage operators and executives navigating the transition from finding growth to scaling it.
At the earliest stages, growth can be scrappy.
The founder closes the first customers. Paid acquisition is tested manually. Partnerships happen through relationships. Marketing channels are judged quickly. What works gets pushed harder.
But the playbook changes as a company moves from Seed to Series A to Series B.
Suddenly, growth has to become repeatable.
Customer acquisition must survive larger budgets. Channels that worked at $20,000 per month may behave differently at $200,000. Teams become specialized. Attribution gets harder. Brand begins to matter. New channels need to be layered in without destroying capital efficiency.
Growing Pains will bring together founders and growth operators who have lived through those transitions for a candid conversation about what actually changes when a company moves from early traction into venture-scale growth.
Not growth theory.
The systems, channels, economics and decisions required to turn momentum into scale.
Topics We’ll Explore
Scaling GTM: How the growth motion changes from founder-led acquisition into repeatable systems across marketing, sales and partnerships.
Paid Acquisition at Scale: Meta Ads, Google, creative testing, audience expansion, acquisition economics and what happens when budgets move materially higher.
Influencer Marketing: Turning creators from isolated sponsorships into structured acquisition, content and distribution channels.
Affiliate & Partner Programs: Designing incentive-driven distribution models that can compound without requiring a proportional increase in internal headcount.
Capital-Efficient Growth: Understanding when to maximize efficiency and when deliberately spending ahead of revenue can create a strategic advantage.
Growth From Seed to Series A: Moving from experimentation into measurable acquisition systems with enough repeatability to justify institutional capital.
Growth From Series A to Series B: Building the organization, economics and distribution engine required to sustain significantly larger growth targets.
Creative as a Growth Lever: Why creative volume, messaging and offer development increasingly become operational capabilities rather than occasional marketing projects.
Attribution & Growth Economics: Understanding CAC, payback periods, LTV, contribution margin and channel-level performance without allowing dashboards to obscure what is actually driving growth.
Hypergrowth Tradeoffs: What founders give up when they optimize for speed, and where aggressive scaling can create organizational or financial fragility.
The Panel
The conversation will be moderated by: Amit Mohan
Founder & Principal · Asymmetric Ventures
Amit is a founder, growth operator and performance marketer with more than a decade of experience in customer acquisition and paid media.
He has bootstrapped companies to approximately $1 million in annual recurring revenue, managed substantial Meta advertising budgets and worked directly with founders on growth strategy, positioning, fundraising readiness and the operating metrics investors scrutinize when companies begin scaling.
He will be joined by a deliberately balanced panel featuring:
Seed to Series A Founder: A founder who has transformed early traction into a repeatable GTM motion and navigated the transition from experimentation to institutional growth.
Series A to Series B Founder: A founder who has experienced the pressure of scaling revenue, acquisition and organizational capacity against increasingly ambitious venture expectations.
Growth Founder or Operator: An experienced company builder with firsthand knowledge of paid acquisition, partnerships, creators, affiliates or another meaningful distribution channel at scale.
Together, they will examine how growth actually evolves as companies move through the venture lifecycle.
Evening Schedule
6:30 to 7:00 PM
Private arrival, reception, small plates and drinks
7:00 to 7:05 PM
Opening remarks and introduction to Growing Pains
7:05 to 7:50 PM
Founder panel on GTM, acquisition and scaling growth
7:50 to 8:05 PM
Audience questions and moderated discussion
8:05 to 9:00 PM
Curated founder conversation and private networking
This gathering is designed for:
Series A founders building repeatable GTM engines
Seed founders preparing for institutional scale
Series B founders managing increasingly aggressive growth expectations
Founders investing meaningfully in paid acquisition
Founders exploring influencers, affiliates, partnerships and additional distribution channels
Growth leaders responsible for customer acquisition and GTM strategy
Select investors and advisors working closely with high-growth companies
This is not intended to be a generic marketing event.
Attendance will be curated around founders and operators responsible for building growth systems capable of supporting venture-scale outcomes.
Why Growing Pains?
ProperRoom NYC was built around a simple idea:
Some of the most consequential founder decisions are rarely discussed candidly in the rooms where founders actually spend their time.
Our recent programming has included our Rooftop Panel on Exit Regrets, bringing Series A+ founders together with an exited Y Combinator founder and advisors to high-growth companies to explore what founders wish they had engineered differently before liquidity became imminent.
That gathering followed our flagship New York Tech Week event, which assembled 345 startups representing more than $1.15 billion in venture backing, alongside venture investors, family offices and founders across multiple stages of growth.
Bootstrap vs. Venture explored the decision between ownership and institutional capital.
The Vanderbilt Problem moved beyond the transaction into legacy, estate planning, trust structures and generational wealth.
Hiring Pains examined what happens when founders begin converting capital into people, executive hires and increasingly complex teams.
Growing Pains is the next conversation in that series.
Because once the capital has been raised and the team has been hired, founders face another question:
Can this company actually scale?
A channel working is not the same as a growth engine.
Early traction is not the same as repeatability.
And adding more capital to an inefficient system does not necessarily create growth.
Sometimes it simply makes the inefficiency larger.
Growing Pains will examine what founders have to build differently when the objective changes from getting traction to sustaining scale.
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