Panel Selection Guidelines

Ultra Light Startups has hosted over 50 panel discussions since we were founded in 2008.  We generally get excellent feedback on our speakers.  What’s the secret to booking great panelists? The guidelines below explain our process.

If you would like to nominate yourself or someone you know you should be mindful of these guidelines. If you have a speaker nomination that meets the guidelines, we’d love to hear from you.  If you introduce us to someone who ends up on the panel you get a free ticket to that event.  Nice!

The Ideal Panelist

Ideally, all our speakers fit these three basic criteria.

  1. The Founder/CEO

    2. Ultra Light Startups has always been a community of founders, by founders.  Our most acclaimed speakers are always Founder/CEO’s.  They always have interesting and provocative positions and can speak from experience as having started a company from nothing in a way that non-Founders cannot.
    We prefer CEO’s to non-CEO Founders.  Being the single individual at the top provides a unique perspective – the perspective the Ultra Light Startups audience has come to expect.
    Also, the term “founder” can be over-used.  In some cases, dozens of people claim to be “founders” of a given startup, but only one of them is its CEO.  This is the person that makes the ideal panelist at Ultra Light Startups.

  2. Of A Financially Successful Company

    3. Financial success is defined as being significantly profitable operationally or a profitable exit for the founder (trade sale or IPO) or both.
    A startup that secures venture funding is not necessarily financially successful.  A profitable exit for the founder(s) is much more important.

  3. That is Technology Enabled

    4. This relates to our definition of a startup. To be a “startup” by our definition, the costs and revenues of the business must scale at different rates as the company grows (revenues scale fast, costs scale slowly).
    Service provider businesses (law firms, web design firms, consultants, etc) are not “startups” by this definition.
    Startups almost always use technology in some unique way to achieve these criteria.

Bonus Points

If you meet any of these, you’re an Ultra Light all-star.  We’ll ask you back to speak again and again.

  • Serial Entrepreneur

    • If you’ve founded more than one business that meets the above criteria, contact us immediately. We need to hear from you!

  • Extensive Speaking Experience

    • Some people are more experienced/engaging public speakers than others.  If there is any video of you speaking on stage or on screen, we’d love to see it.

  • Bootstrappers

    • Ultra Light Startups was founded on the principle that  it’s increasingly possible to build a profitable, technology-enabled business without venture capital.  Many of our best panelists have achieved this.

  • Women

    • We support female entrepreneurship and we’d love to have more women on our panels. When recruiting for a recent panel, we received 37 panelist nominations, 36 of whom were men. Unfortunately, this nomination ratio is pretty typical. We need more women panelists and more women entrepreneurs.  If you know a woman who meets the three basic criteria above, please nominate her.  Note – feel free to nominate men too, we don’t discriminate.

Extra Bonus Points

What we love more than anything else is people who have been attending Ultra Light Startups for a period of time and have built their startup from a concept into a profitable business during that time.  These people are testimonials to Ultra Light Startups and tangible inspirations for the rest of the community.  If you meet the above criteria (successful tech Founder/CEO) and have been an active part of the Ultra Light Startups community, please contact us immediately to get you on a panel!

Red Flags

Here are two conditions that will immediately derail a panelist nomination.

  • Incongruous Online Profiles

    • We use a number of sources to validate prospective speakers backgrounds.  The About Us page on a prospective speaker’s company website and his/her LinkedIn profile are particularly useful.  Any time the biographical information in these profiles does not match or contradicts statements made over email or verbally it raises a “red flag”.  We’ve been burned more than a few times by people with incongruous online profiles and we are very sensitive to it.

  • History of Flakiness

    • If you commit to speak on a panel, it’s important that you follow through and show up to speak. Attendees have paid their hard-earned money to see you and are justified in being disappointed if you don’t show. If you have a history of not following through we can’t risk our members time and money by booking you on future panels.

All Stars

Here are some of our all-star speakers over the past 3 years. Many of them have spoken on multiple Ultra Light Startups panels.  All are welcome back as often as their schedule permits. They all meet the criteria listed above.  In alphabetic order…

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