Jason Cohen is the founder of four companies including Smart Bear and currently WPEngine. He took Smart Bear from start to multiple millions in profit, without debt or VC, then sold it for cash. He's also a mentor at Capital Factory (like Y-Combinator in Austin) and an angel investor.

Deceit infests business: salesmen deceive, PR spins, tech support deflects, marketers mislead, strategists out-wit, founders preen. Entrepreneurs mislead to seem big and stable; multi-nationals mislead to seem relatable and human. It's the game.

But what happens when you don't play along? From my own experience of building 4 companies from scratch and from data and stories from hundreds of other founders, I've discovered something fascinating: That honesty is more profitable than deceit. Not because it's ethical, but because it's more effective.

Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni is the founder and CEO of Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Mockups. Balsamiq is a tiny, nine-person multi-million dollar company with offices in 4 cities. A programmer turned entrepreneur, Peldi lives to learn new skills and to share what he learns, be it via his blog, giving talks or mentoring other software startups.

Summary/Abstract Here.

Hiten Shah is a serial entrepreneur who loves to help other entrepreneurs avoid the mistakes he has made in the past like wasting $1 million on a failed web hosting business. He started 3 successful Internet companies starting with a marketing consultancy, ACS. Then he went on to start Crazy Egg, a tool to help people visualize the user experience on their websites and most recently he is the CEO and Co-founder of KISSmetrics.

Over the last 9 years Hiten has started 3 successful Internet related companies, a consulting company, a bootstrapped software as a service business and a venture backed company. He has also failed more times than he can count. In this talk, he will share his lessons learned during this entrepreneurial journey.

Rob Walling has been starting companies for most of his life and is author of the book Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup. His blog, Software By Rob, is a top 20 startup blog and is read by about 20,000 web entrepreneurs each month. It covers startup marketing and software entrepreneurship.

As a software developer turned entrepreneur I’ve learned most things the hard way. Years of trial and error have unearthed a laundry list of false assumptions, missed expectations and times when “best practices” were not the right approach to a problem. Using stories from my experience I will share lessons I’ve learned over the past several years, each of which has had a profound impact on my ability to run my company.

Amy Hoy is a Product Crusader. She's building her own product empire of web apps (Freckle, Charm), training, and educational products. She aims to help you do the same.

Amy's talk will examine the necessary ingredients for being (and feeling) successful, and how to go about making them happen in your biz before you start (or when you need to course correct).

Patrick McKenzie used to be a Japanese salaryman. Concurrent with this, he founded a small software business, Bingo Card Creator, which eventually turned his day job into a poorly paying quirky hobby. Since quitting, he has launched his second software business, Appointment Reminder, and is happy as a clam.

Having a day job doesn't have to be an insurmountable barrier to running a successful software business. Patrick walks you through development and marketing methods to make most effective use of your spare time, allowing you to get your business up and running and begin learning from it. Some of the techniques include making MVPs, low-touch sales processes, and ways to improve your development process so you spend less time firefighting and more time moving forward.

Mike runs Moon River Software and Moon River Consulting, two companies he started as a way to bypass the corporate ladder and avoid what would otherwise be a lot of corporate red tape.

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Dave Collins has spoken at conferences in the United States, China, Russia, Germany, France, Belgium and the United Kingdom. He has delivered over 70 presentations at more than 30 different events, conferences, webinars, online classes, networking events, an accelerator program for startups and more. His reputation is based on his wide range of experience, and willingness to share good, useful information. Either that or his receding hairline, dislike of the word "awesome" and the ever-expanding bags under his eyes. If you're not dazzled by everything that Dave says, it's probably down to jet lag.

Most AdWords accounts are wasting money and opportunity with the advertiser never realising it. Dave Collins has been working with Google AdWords for almost twelve years, and has been responsible for millions of dollars in ad spend for hundreds of companies from all over the world. Dave estimates that approximately 99.6% of the AdWords accounts that he's seen are wasting money and/or opportunities. Dave's presentation will focus on raising awareness and providing you with the tactics and techniques you need to turn AdWords into an incredibly profitable machine.