Modeling Your Startup & Validating Assumptions with David Gardner

​In the earliest stages of building a startup, your biggest risk isn’t building the product — it’s building the wrong product. In this hands-on session, serial entrepreneur and investor David Gardner will guide founders through the critical process of startup modeling and assumption validation.

​With over 30 years of experience, seven startups, and six successful exits under his belt, David has seen firsthand what separates sustainable startups from those that flame out. This workshop is designed to help you build smarter from the start by identifying the key assumptions driving your business model and learning how to test them quickly and affordably.

​Meet David Gardner

​David is a serial entrepreneur, writer, adviser, and early-stage fund manager with over thirty years of experience in creating and building software technology companies. After failing at retirement twice, David became the Triangle’s most active angel investor spending his time as a volunteer coach and mentor to startup founders and managing a free accelerator he sponsors with the Town of Cary. To combat the lack of early stage capital in NC, David created and runs Cofounders Capital, a $12M seed fund, the success of which led to a second $31M fund. As an entrepreneur, David was the founder or co-founder of seven companies including PeopleClick (purchased for $100 million) and Report2Web, which sold for $12M in less than eleven months from inception. He has demonstrated a record for consistency across multiple industries with six successful exits in a row… and one he refuses to talk about. David served as the Executive VP and Thought Leader for Compuware, a Fortune 1000 Corporation, after it acquired ProviderLink, a healthcare IT exchange he founded. As a writer, David is author of a popular book on entrepreneurship called The StartUp Hats. He has published many articles and forward-thinking white papers on technical innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. Among other firsts, David is credited with founding and launching the first software-as-a-service venture in NC. As a lifelong learner, David is constantly researching new technologies and challenging traditional ways of thinking. In addition to several years of full-time computer science and business-related post graduate studies at NCSU, Mr. Gardner holds degrees in Philosophy and Music with a postgraduate concentration in theology and dead languages. What drives David today is his passion for helping smart, coach-able, first-time entrepreneurs build their businesses, watching them succeed and witnessing their life-changing transformations.