For early-stage ventures, the biggest challenge is often connecting to customers in a way that employs your limited resources at the highest return. Join us for an exclusive conversation with founder and HBS Rock Center Executive Fellow Julia Austin to learn more about how to ensure you get the right product/service across to the right groups of people. 

Julia Austin will be discussing her professional trajectory, advice for acquiring customers as an early-stage venture, and her perspective on how to target and engage your base. Read some of her published insights at https://medium.com/@austinfish.

About Julia Austin

Julia Austin has extensive experience scaling and managing highly productive teams in both mature and start-up organizations. After experiencing VMware’s growth from 600 employees to over 15K, an IPO spin-out from EMC, wearing multiple hats and working with three different CEOs, Julia left VMware in 2013 to once again focus on her daughters as they navigated their teen years. During that time, Julia developed her leadership coaching practice, started to angel invest, mentored founders through TechStars Boston and in 2016 received a faculty appointment to teach Product Management at Harvard Business School. At the same time she began teaching at HBS, Julia joined DigitalOcean as their CTO and devoted two years to commuting between NYC and Boston to help the company release seven new products, build out the leadership team and structured and scaled their product, engineering, design and marketing teams. In 2018, she transitioned to an advisor at DigitalOcean and remained at HBS full time to continue to teach Product Management. During that time, Julia also became the faculty leader of Startup Bootcamp, an intensive, 200-student, program that introduces all things startup to aspiring entrepreneurs and startup joiners.

With five terrific years teaching at HBS under her belt (and successfully launching all three daughters into their adult lives), in 2020 Julia decided to focus on her executive coaching practice and running her non-profit organization, Good For Her - a collection of peer cohorts for women entrepreneurs. She is still part of the HBS family, serving as an Executive Fellow in the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship and continues to invest in, advise and sit on the boards of early stage companies and nonprofits in Boston, New York, Boulder and San Francisco.

Please note that registration for this event closes 1 hour prior to the start of the session.