Extreme Entrepreneurs Program: top global tech leaders to inspire young founders

Lightspeed, for its third edition of Extreme Entrepreneurs (EE) Program, has announced a power-packed line up of startup icons, to help Indian and Southeast Asian entrepreneurs learn how to build their ventures.

It includes global tech bigwigs – Tony Fadell, who is the iPod inventor, iPhone co-inventor, founder of Nest; Ming Maa, president of Grab; Ryan Roslansky, CEO of LinkedIn; and Balaji Srinivasan, ex-CTO of Coinbase. Top Indian leaders including Ashwini Asokan, founder and CEO of Vue.ai; Raveendran, found of Byju’s; Sujeet Kumar, co-founder of Udaan and ex-President of Flipkart; and Abhiraj Bhal, co-founder and CEO of Urban Company, amongst others.

Vaibhav Agrawal, partner at Lightspeed, said EE takes your blinders off, inspires founders to dream bigger, opens their minds to new possibilities. He said these global leaders in technology are equally passionate to do this for the EE cohort. “The candid, closed door sessions with these stalwarts will help unlock new ways of thinking and we are super excited to host them for Indian and Southeast Asian EE founders.” Agrawal pointed out that leaders like Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and co-founder Affirm, Alex Chung, co-founder of Giphy and John Thompson, chairman of Microsoft, as well as Vaibhav Gupta, co-founder of Udaan have been mentors at EE. He said industry experts will host Clinics where EE founders get to sharpen their chops on areas such as product-market fit, growth marketing, sales, hiring, product design and fundraising.

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EE will be a six-week program, live every Tuesday that will allow founders to learn while they run their startups. Launched in 2018 with a mission to bring outsiders in, the program charges zero-equity and zero-fees for participation. The only selection criteria for EE are whether the founders will benefit from, and make the most of the opportunity. For the first time, EE is inviting startups from Southeast Asia, in addition to India, and will be 100 per cent digital.

Lightspeed is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors.