Kalev Kaarna

Kalev Kaarna has 10+ years of helping deep-tech founders find their first super happy customers. He currently works as Business Development Manager at Metrosert’s Autonomous Vehicles Unit. Before that he spent five years as an investor and startup coach at Superangel, running the accelerator program and helping pre-seed and seed startups raise their next rounds, and was part of the Estonian team of Creative Destruction Lab, a global deep-tech accelerator. Having worked alongside top-level scientists for over a decade, Kalev can speak the language of many scientific fields. He is fascinated by product positioning, customer discovery, B2B sales, and the hard work of understanding what people will actually pay for.

„Finding Super Happy Customers for Deep Tech Products in the AI Era“

 Even well-intentioned customers lie to you. This is an especially hard problem for developers of deep-tech hardware, software, and smart-city solutions. Technology breakthroughs have hundreds of possible applications. In the AI era, building a solution is expected to be fast and relatively cheap. So how do you know which product or feature to build? AI has not yet made answering these questions any easier.
This talk is for both companies purchasing deep-tech solutions and startups developing them. Using real examples, Kalev shares a few mental models for deciding what to build:

• three reasons customers lie without meaning to
• follow the money, not the praise
• sell before you build
• Fear of Messing Up always beats Fear of Missing Out