Executive Summary

Coresight Research was one of the sponsors of this year’s Ascent Conference, held October 3–4 in New York City. This report features our takeaways from the first day of the event.

This technology conference brings together senior leaders and startup founders in the East Coast Tech community, and many big brands, including Oracle, Foursquare, Insight Ventures, Techstars and Lyfte, attended the event.

• The “second wave of fintech” will provide consumers with autonomous solutions to better optimize their finances.
• Venture capital (VC) executives noted that a transformation has taken place in the VC industry in the past 10 years, from new investment vehicles such as crowdfunding and initial coin offerings (ICOs) democratizing the investment process to significant increases in the sizes of seed-stage deals.
• Growth hacking—or non-traditional approaches to marketing—is becoming increasingly important and is helping businesses differentiate themselves from competitors, increase online visibility, traffic to their site and ultimately,convert the traffic.