NGEN Trailblazers Conference – Spring 2025

April 12, 2025

In the spirit of “you can just do things,” I pushed myself to attend this entrepreneurship conference by myself. I tend to feel uncomfortable at “networking” events; this was a great opportunity to make the uncomfortable feel a bit more comfortable.

Environment Matters

These kinds of events remind me just how important environment is for success. Everyone in the room had a story to tell about what they were building. I felt naked without a project of my own.

It is human nature to want to fit in. In a room full of complacency, I'll naturally sink to that level. But in a room full of courage and passion, I'll rise to the occasion. Not because I'm special, but because I'm human.

Ambition is contagious.

More than any advice given by the speakers, getting to talk to the other students was hands-down the most inspiring element of the conference. It feels strange admitting that, because that seems to be exactly what the organizers want us to think. But maybe there's good reason for it.

Each speaker was tremendous. I want to record some thoughts given by some of my favorites so I can look back and reference back to the important points.

Speaker Highlights

Eric Chen gave an awesome presentation on customer discovery. When building QuickCase, I worked out of order: I identified a problem, built a prototype, then “interviewed” customers (gave them a Google Form). Lots of problems here. I could not have known what customers truly wanted before interviewing them. Instead, I spent a year guessing. I eventually asked ridiculous hypotheticals (like, “assuming the product were accurate most of the time...”). The user testing cohort was a group of students from Penn Carey Law— my brother's friends. They knew the product was built by the brother of their friend, so they likely bit their tongue when giving feedback. I should have read The Mom Test. I gained so much value from a workshop only 30 minutes in length; I left with more questions than I came in with, which I believe is a good thing. Maybe I will reach out to Chen to try to learn a bit more from him one-on-one.

Geoff Ralston, former President of YC, was phenomenal, as expected. He predicts AGI will be here by 2027, and no later than 2030. He thinks society will soon be bifurcated into two distinct classes: humans and superhumans (thought experiment: what happens when Neuralink integrates LLMs into human brains to give individuals access to all of human knowledge?). He had some crazy theory about quantum mechanics implying multiple universes exist— this one definitely went over my head.

But he gave these crazy takes to illustrate a simple, yet powerful framework for evaluating a startup. To win, you need to have a contrarian view. Eric Chen emphasized a similar point. Winners are those whose views are right, but non-consensus. That's hard.

Adapted from Matt Rickard.

Pitch Competition & Takeaways

One of the UPenn engineers I met earlier in the day ended up winning the event's pitch competition, earning him a $10k note from BullMont Capital. His product leveraged conversational AI agents for more efficient procurement processes. Perhaps best of all, he was a nice, genuine guy. I truly was rooting for him.

Why not me? On the train ride home, I listened to YC podcasts about Vertical AI Agents, watched tutorials on building agentic workflows in n8n, and brainstormed potential SaaS replacements in my Notes app. This event reignited an entrepreneurial excitement I haven't felt since the Silicon Valley Tiger Trek trip in January.