Shantanu Narayen
Shantanu Narayen

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen delivered opening night keynote address of TiEcon’s 24th annual expo, sharing his thoughts on topics ranging from data healthcare technology and education.

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In addition to Narayen, the speaker list for the event includes such names as Diane Greene, co-founder and former CEO of VMware and currently senior vice-president of Google, and Bonny Simmi, three-time Olympian, commercial pilot, and head of JetBlue Technology Ventures, and Nobel Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi.

This year, the expo introduced VC Connect, a program which seeks to introduce start-ups to potential venture capital investors. Each year, TiE 50 selects 50 start-ups for its Mentor Connect program, which was launched in 2009 – this year, 1,732 start-ups from 13 countries applied.

Thousands of vendors travel from far and wide to be able to speak at or show off their products at this expo, with most using companies like Trade Show Booth to create bespoke graphics and free promotional items to get their message across to visitors. Out of all the entrepreneurs who have set up as exhibitors at the event, none are younger than 9-year-old Yash Semlani, who is working on his own lemonade stand franchise.

“Robots can never be great at marketing,” said Shantanu Narayen. “Human intuition cannot be replaced.”

“It is an absolutely phenomenal time in the Valley to be an entrepreneur,” he added during his keynote address. Enterprises are seeing experience waves, where customers are demanding consistent, compelling, personalized service, at every level of contact with companies. He calls it the third wave, saying the first wave of enterprise disruption was the back-office wave, with companies wanting to consider using an ERP System and focusing on enterprise resource planning, and the next wave was the front-office wave, with firms focusing on Salesforce and customer relationship management.