TechCrunch is hosting a one-day founder conference in Boston on November 4 featuring sessions on fundraising, hiring, AI strategy, and scaling. Speakers include investors and founders like HubSpot's Brian Halligan and executives from Underscore, NEA, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

• Sessions cover concrete founder challenges: how to raise capital in today's market, evaluate investors beyond valuation, and identify when you've actually hit product-market fit
• The event emphasizes that building outside Silicon Valley is viable — one speaker scaled a company to 30+ countries from Boston without relocating
• Networking with other founders and investors happens alongside the talks, positioning the day as a way to build ongoing relationships rather than just attend sessions

Nicholas, CEO of Rillet, explains why he chose to build an ERP system despite a history of failed challengers to QuickBooks and NetSuite, and how his team spent two to three years in stealth shipping micro-launches before finding product-market fit. He argues founders should cut anything that doesn't touch customers or revenue, and that a narrow wedge product is easier to sell and support than a broad platform.

• He bet on execution rather than a speculative trend: he already knew the problem from a previous job and had a rough shape of the solution.
• Stealth worked only because they ran multiple micro-launches with real customers, which exposed them to negative feedback that five close friends never would.
• He recommends launching with a wedge that leads into the bigger platform, since a wide ERP surface area creates support load and code interdependencies that drown small teams quickly.

Yupp, an AI model-picking service, is shutting down less than a year after launching despite initial user growth and backing from prominent investors. The founders cited an inability to achieve product-market fit and rapid changes in AI development as key reasons for the closure. Some employees will move to another AI company, while others are job hunting.

• Yupp raised $33M (seed, led by a16z crypto's Chris Dixon, with Jeff Dean and Biz Stone as investors) but shut down in under a year despite hitting 1.3M users and gathering feedback on 800 AI models.
• Founders say they couldn't find product-market fit because the industry is shifting from user-generated feedback to expert-driven evaluation of AI models.
• The broader pivot toward autonomous, agentic AI systems (rather than human-in-the-loop feedback) undercut Yupp's core business model.
• Some employees are moving to another "well-known" AI company while others are job hunting.