Last week, The Ascent Conference hosted two days of learning and growth during their second annual event, focused on bringing together leaders in the tech community to learn, collaborate, and help accelerate innovation. Though typically Ascent focuses on the East Coast tech community, given this year’s constraints from COVID-19 and an industry shift to virtual,  the event was hosted online—connecting ~6,000 founders, investors, SaaS professionals, and marketers within the startup community across the United States.

Ascent featured three different stages at this year’s event: The Sales and Marketing Stage, Startup Grad School Stage, and a Main Stage are where SaaS leaders shared their secrets for success. This year’s agenda featured speakers like Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz, David Siegel, CEO of Meetup, Nate Smith, Founder & CEO of Lever, Vanessa Liu, VP of SAP.iO, Peter Boyce II, Partner at General Catalyst, David Berkowitz, Kris Rudeegraap, Co-Founder & CEO Sendoso, Udi Ledergor, CMO at Gong, Alon Alroy, Co-Founder of Bizzabo, and much more.

Several cred speakers took the virtual stage to share their expert tips for growing companies, including:

• Vasco Pedro, Co-Founder & CEO of Unbabel shared What they don’t teach you at business school about fundraising.

• Tamara Steffins, Managing Director at M12 shared her tips for Scaling from Seed to C: What Founders Should and Should Not Prioritize Through Growth.

• Jason VandeBoom, Founder & CEO of ActiveCampaign outlined The Sustainable Path To $100M: Lessons From ActiveCampaign's Growth.

• Matt Epstein, CMO of Rippling discussed How to Reach $10M ARR on a Shoestring Budget.

• Nick Huzar, CEO & Co-Founder of OfferUp discussed Building a Unicorn from Used Goods.

• In a fireside chat, David Pakman, Partner at Venrock spoke to From Startup to $1 Billion Exit – How Dollar Shave Club Defied the Odds.

• Chris Savage, Founder & CEO of Wistia discussed Building a Forever Brand with Brand Affinity Marketing.

Additional highlights include:

One of our favorite talks by Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro. He shared how to End Your Marketing Reliance on Facebook & Google’s Duopoly. His advice for how to make marketing a core strength?

“Invest where others don’t, in ways that they won’t, with hard to attribute ROI and you can earn a competitive advantage”

All speakers received a custom pair of Ascent socks with their faces on them — one of the coolest speaker gifts we’ve ever seen!

Everyone’s favorite part of attending events is the networking, so to facilitate this in this new virtual environment, Ascent leveraged the Brella networking platform to connect attendees during the 4pm Happy Hour.

Altogether, another successful event in the books! Can’t wait to see what the Ascent team has in store for 2021.