“We work with big corporations and tiny startups… they work at different speeds. It’s insightful to see how we can be that middle ground,” Ted explained. “It’s an experiment… a new consortium model for Techstars.”

Ted is taking part in a Thursday morning panel at ResloveTO that explores the ways startups can grow through cultivating partnerships with large corporations.

Ted answers our five questions:

What are you working on right now that you are really excited about?

We just launched our third program just a couple weeks ago. Applications are open for mobility companies to join Techstars. We’re looking for any technology startup that enables people and goods to move around more freely — companies that are advancing mobility using connected, shared, autonomous and electric technologies.

For example, last year Spatial came into the program. They’re exploring ways to build an API around hyper-specific location data. How do you answer questions that a local would know? An API can uncover that information. They’re working with Ford on three projects that are looking at different ways to integrate their technology to understand a location.

We’re accepting applications for our mobility program until April 9. If you’re thinking of working with big organizations in the U.S., now would be a great time to apply. We also have openings in other programs if you’re looking for another fit.

What was the pivotal moment or decision that set you on the path to your current career?

A lot of serendipity. It was the right timing, and the right place. My wife and I were looking into moving east from San Francisco. I literally googled to see what was going on in Detroit and shot Detroit Venture Partners an email. There I helped turn them into a $55M fund that invested in 25 startups. Along the way our group brought Techstars to town and I left DVP to run the Mobility program in Detroit for Techstars. So it all started with an email five years ago.

If you could give one piece of advice to a tiny, freshly-minted startup, what would it be?

In a startup, the people matter most. I looked at more than 1,000 startups over the last few years. There are dozens of great ideas, but it’s hard to find that great team. As an analogy, think of a band: all members play a key role in making that music. You need to find people in those complementary roles. Find people who are driven by passion. If you are in it for the wrong reasons, you aren’t going to last that long. The right people have a shared passion to change the world and the lives of their customers.

What can legacy organizations learn from startups to keep up with the fast pace of innovation required in today’s economy?

Large organizations need to develop ways to interface with and learn from small startups. They need to have a mindset that asks: how do you learn from startups… through investments, partnerships, pilots? Ultimately, how do you build a process with a goal that is not just ROI or integration? How do you meet startups with accelerated learning in order to incorporate that? How do you learn and develop processes that integrate different ways of working? If it’s approached in an exploratory way, you’re going to learn to work together.

What do you foresee as the biggest tech innovation to impact business in 2017?

I’m in the mobility space, so technology that moves people and goods is the biggest tech innovation. It’s not a single thing, it’s an alignment of a lot of things. Cities, local governments and federal governments working with startups, even the Ubers of the world, are starting to transform the way people move around. There will be more alignment around the complexity of transportation — new opportunities are opening up worldwide that embrace autonomous roads, connected highways and electric charging stations. 2017 will see a lot more alignment around the complexity of these different initiatives.

See Ted Serbinski’s panel Walking the walk at ResolveTO, 3:20 p.m. on Thursday, January 26th.

David Chouinard is an evangelist for human connection. With technology enabling billions of people to connect to one another, David is interested in how we can empower people to build mutually beneficial human networks, to share ideas, skills and opportunities.

He has been in the trenches on both sides, engineering products at startups and gargantuan media companies alike. In his current role at Facebook’s Connectivity Lab, David is driven by the question “What does it mean to be connected to the world?”. His mandate is to go beyond the technology itself, to ignite the inherent human potential in connected networks.

In his upcoming ResolveTO talk, David will explore what it takes to build internal teams with the momentum, urgency and caliber of the world’s best startups.

David answers our five questions:

What are you working on right now that you are really excited about?

In my work on connectivity, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to empower underconnected people who aren’t integrated in a strong network, like the one here in Silicon Valley.

I’m working on a side project called Design Review, which is a first pass at this. It gives access to the top product designers for a one-hour design review session. Starting with that one vertical, I don’t know where this is going to go. But I think we really underestimate how many people don’t have access to that kind of network.

What was the pivotal moment or decision that set you on the path to your current career?

Early in my life, I was always the person carrying business cards. I was always this person who knew I wanted to make something significant. I learned software engineering because I knew it was skill with unprecedented leverage on the world. And seeing the impact I could have with building software set me on the path of working on connectivity — wanting to bring this power to more people.

If you could give one piece of advice to a tiny, freshly-minted startup, what would it be?

This is advice I know is well understood, but I constantly need to remind myself of it: focus everything you have on the next existential problem for your company… Focus, I think is the biggest asset for a startup and it’s just pervasively tempting to dilute it.

It’s overwhelming how many things there are to be busy on at an early phase company… There are so many things that need to get done and it’s just really easy to lose track of the big thing.

What can legacy organizations learn from startups to keep up with the fast pace of innovation required in today’s economy?

It’s amazing that startups ever work. Above anything else I think what startups have is urgency.

When designing teams in large organizations, we rob a lot of really high potential teams from the sense of urgency. That’s the biggest mistake we make. We take these people who are super qualified, add just the right environment and everything is perfect, and then we slide out the urgency part… There might be some diffused sense of urgency, but it’s important that it be be this personal sense of urgency.

What do you foresee as the biggest tech innovation to impact business in 2017?

We overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. It’s easy to tell you that 2017 is the year of VR or AI or some other exciting technology. But the answer is that it’s not.

I think the thing that will be really significant is e-commerce. Amazon is now finally bigger than all major retailers combined. It took a long time, but we’ve finally hit this inflection point. We’re going to see an explosion of direct-to-consumer models, big changes in physical retail and lots of interesting companies. We’ve predicted this for a long time, but when people stop paying attention is when the real action happens.

See David Chouinard’s ResolveTO talk Building world-class R&D teams on January 27 at 11:40 a.m. on the Keynote Stage.

BetterCompany CEO Tom Williams believes that it takes more than free breakfast and a foosball table to nurture employee success and retention. Instead, make it easy for employees to share experiences, support one another and collaboratively solve workplace challenges. The key: encourage honesty by enabling employees to talk anonymously with their peers.

In his upcoming ResolveTO talk, Tom will explore how today’s leaders can be accountable to their shareholders, employees and customers by nurturing an “active listening culture”, both internally and externally.

After building his career around technological solutions that positively impact people, Tom rolled out BetterCompany with the sole purpose of helping people have a better workday. Using the BetterCompany social networking app, employees can anonymously connect with their peers in similar roles and industries to chat, support one another and share career advice.

Beyond cultivating relationships, Tom hopes that BetterCompany will empower employees to better express themselves at work and contribute professionally in new ways.

Tom answers our five questions:

What are you working on right now that you are really excited about?

We’ve been working with some incredible organizations this year piloting a new product that is designed to help companies attract the right, new talent to their organizations.

What was the pivotal moment or decision that set you on the path to your current career?

Three weeks after my first child was born and right after Christmas, a simple landing page I had built suddenly generated a flood of signups from C-level executives from around the World. Over the next few weeks, I spoke to hundreds of executives from different industries and company sizes, all of whom were looking for ways to unlock greater honesty from their employees.

If you could give one piece of advice to a tiny, freshly-minted startup, what would it be?

Find out how to make a lot of money as quickly as possible. A lot of startups forget that making money is critical to survival.

What can legacy organizations learn from startups to keep up with the fast pace of innovation required in today’s economy?

Plan less, experiment more. Each executive should be able to run at least one experiment a quarter.

What do you foresee as the biggest tech innovation to impact business in 2017?

I hate to be so cliched but Machine Learning and AI will create the biggest impact for most businesses and will also create the most redundancies in 2017.

See Tom Williams’ talk The enlightenment of the Social CEO at ResolveTO, 10:40am on Friday, January 27th.