What Makes a Product Win? Lessons From 20+ Years of Building & Scaling
Join us for a fireside chat with Leonard Porcano, seasoned entrepreneur, product builder, innovation leader, and Venture Partner at Tenney 10 / American Family Insurance, for a practical conversation about turning ambitious ideas into products that can actually find their market and scale.
Over the past 20+ years, Leonard has built and launched products across startups, large organizations, and highly regulated industries. His experience ranges from creating AI-powered platforms like Leasebot and Clear Door, to building and leading an internal innovation lab at Vertex Inc., where his team developed AI-driven tax and supply-chain solutions. Earlier in his career, he helped transform Plus Three into a leading technology provider for political campaigns and nonprofits, quadrupling revenue through new online fundraising products.
Throughout that journey, Leonard has had to solve a challenge every founder eventually faces: how do you take a promising idea, turn it into something customers genuinely value, and build the systems needed to scale it?
In this session, Leonard will explore:
How to move from an idea to a product customers actually want
What founders can learn from building products across very different industries
How to simplify complex technology into a clear, compelling customer experience
Where AI creates genuine product value — and where it doesn't
How to maintain speed and experimentation as teams and businesses grow
The role partnerships can play in accelerating distribution and adoption
How to balance long-term vision with the realities of execution
Lessons learned from products, experiments, and ideas that didn't go according to plan
Whether you're validating your first product, trying to find product-market fit, introducing AI into your business, or figuring out how to scale what you've already built, this conversation will offer practical lessons from more than two decades of turning ideas into real products and businesses.