DISCOVER THE EVENT LINEUP
Innovation Crawl
Join us for the 4th Annual Innovation Crawl to kick off RI Startup Week! This year the Greater Newport Chamber of Commerce and RIHUB are teaming up to tour some of Rhode Island’s most innovative companies and spaces. We’re hopping on buses and taking a tour around the Ocean State. Starting and ending in Newport the bus tour will visit several centers of innovation around the state. Join us after the crawl for a happy hour! Seats are limited, so be sure to purchase your ticket soon. (Ticket price includes bus transport, a light breakfast, lunch, and one complimentary beer at happy hour.)
Beta Bash RI
Beta Bash RI is a single-day, in-person event where early-stage startups skip the pitch deck and open their betas to real users for live, hands-on testing. Selected founders set up interactive product stations — no slides, no scripted demos — while attendees rotate, use the products, and provide structured feedback. It’s part science fair, part UX lab, and entirely focused on signal over performance. The event runs approximately 3 hours and culminates in a short founder debrief and open networking session.
yconic AI Summit (First Day)
Join us as yconic leads us on the cutting edge of AI innovation from 9:00 to 2:00 on Monday the 21st and Tuesday the 22nd. Speakers and topics to be announce soon!
Arnell Milhouse
Hard Hat Tour: Building the Small Business Collective
Before the furniture arrives. Before the paint dries. Before the doors officially open. We'd love to invite you inside. Join us for a special Hard Hat Tour of the future home of the Small Business Collective and get a first look at a community being built for Rhode Island's entrepreneurs, small business owners, creators, problem-solvers, and changemakers. This is not simply a tour of a building. It's an opportunity to experience the space, hear the vision, meet members of the growing SBC community, and learn how we're creating a place where people can connect, collaborate, learn, and grow together. As we walk through the unfinished space, we'll share what we're building, why we're building it, and how individuals and organizations across Southern New England are helping shape what comes next. Small Business Collective was founded on a simple belief: when people come together to share knowledge, relationships, encouragement, and opportunity, remarkable things happen. The walls are still going up. The community is already taking shape. Come see what we're building together.
Mollie Frazer Williams
Closing the Founder Success Gap: 5 Habits That Separate Founders Who Can Excel Quickly
Most founders aren't struggling because they lack talent — they're struggling because no one taught them ways to handle the weight of constant high-stakes decisions. This session walks through five habits that separate founders who scale quickly from those who may stall or burn out, drawn from real coaching work with founders in make-or-break moments. Practical, story-driven, and built for founders who want to move faster with less stress, not more work.
How to Successfully Find a Co-Founder
Starting a business requires far more than one person’s expertise. Successful founders recognize that turning an idea into a thriving enterprise often depends on partnering with someone whose strengths complement their own. The right co-founder can bring sharper strategy, stronger execution, and greater focus to the business journey. In this interactive workshop, two entrepreneurs will share why they made the strategic decision to bring on co-founders and how those partnerships contributed to their success. Participants will learn the criteria they used to select the right partner, the expectations they established from Day One, and the practical steps they took to build cohesive, productive, and high-performing working relationships.
Beth Carter
Bahar Bilgen
Ozge Whiting
Peg Fradette
Meaghan Krupa
John MacKrell
Building an AI-Forward Sales Process (That Actually Works)
AI is rebuilding how the best teams sell — but bolted onto a messy process, it just automates the chaos. This session covers what an AI-forward sales process actually looks like: where AI genuinely improves the sales motion, what has to be in place first, and the order of operations for building a sales system that scales. Led by Jeffrey D'Entremont, founder of Peak Partners (HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner, 100+ CRM implementations). Built for founders and small revenue teams.
Jeffrey D'Entremont
Immigration Options for Startups
This session provides a practical map of U.S. immigration pathways available to startups in 2026. The landscape has shifted materially in the past year, especially for H-1B, and startups need to choose a pathway based on their profile, the company's stage, and current policy conditions. The goal is not to make anyone an immigration expert in an hour, but to help startup founders (1) Understand different visa categories (2) identify which immigration pathways are realistic for their situation, (3) know what to prepare before starting an immigration case.
Zach Lyons
AI Is Coming for Your Moat: What Investors and Founders Need to Know About Defensible Enterprise Value
AI is making it easier to build, copy, search, test, and challenge. For startups and investors, that changes the meaning of defensibility. This session will explore how companies can build durable enterprise value through technology ownership, software and data rights, trade secrets, patents, trademarks, contracts, commercialization strategy, and exit readiness.
Dan Holmander
When *NOT* to Pursue Patent Protection
Working with inventors over the last 16 years, we have learned that there are times we must advise an entrepreneur not to pursue patent protection. This can be due to many factors: like when a search reveals contradicting prior art; when the invention, while innovative, will not pass the examination process without undue expense and resulting in a weak patent; or when a method patent is inappropriate. We will discuss these pitfalls and give real stories of successes and failures, focusing on the Rhode Island startups we have worked with. We will outline the three tests that the US Patent Office applies to an invention, how to overcome those tests, and other avenues for intellectual-property protection, including trade secrets, trademarks, "use in commerce," and copyright. Scott Keeley is a registered patent agent who has been working with Rhode Island inventors since 2009.
Embracing the Pirate Side - How to Discover Your Authentic Brand
This is not your typical “Five Steps to a Better Brand” presentation. This is the story of how, seven years ago, I embraced my pirate side and discovered an authentic brand for my business. It’s well known that pirates are true entrepreneurs (usually starting from nothing) and excel at branding. So let’s spend some time together, and I’ll share how I guide clients on a journey to discover their own authentic brand treasure.
Justin Kerr
yconic AI Summit (Second day)
Join us as yconic leads us on the cutting edge of AI innovation from 9:00 to 2:00 on Monday the 21st and Tuesday the 22nd. Speakers and topics to be announce soon!
AI Powered Marketing for Startups
Whether you're launching a startup or growing a small business, AI can become a valuable marketing partner. This one-hour, hands-on workshop teaches entrepreneurs how to leverage generative AI tools for market research, customer insights, competitive analysis, market sizing, persona creation, and content development. Designed for beginners, the session focuses on practical applications that support smarter marketing decisions and faster execution.
Shelly Nichols
Intuition Is Data: Unlocking Your Inner Knowing for Unstoppable Success
What if the most underutilized data point in your business was already inside you? This 60-minute keynote and workshop makes the case that intuition is not a soft skill. It is not a luxury reserved for the spiritually attuned. It is pattern recognition running below your conscious awareness, ancestral and energetic intelligence your body has been processing this whole time, and the real-time signal most founders and investors have been trained to override. That override is costing them time, money, and leading to burn out. I am a Cartier Women's Initiative Fellow, a second-time founder with two patents, and a third-generation Narragansett local who built an investor-backed medical wearable company and then burned out trying to outthink every decision and override my intuition. My biggest pivots did not come from spreadsheets. They came the moment I started treating my internal signals with the same rigor I gave my KPIs. What followed: health stabilized, the business expanded, aligned opportunities appeared. I brought this talk to Cartier Women's Initiative Fellows and other conscious business programs. Now I am bringing it home to Rhode Island. Here is what founders, operators, and investors walk away with: -The science, first. Your gut houses 500 million neurons. It operates as a second nervous system. The vagus nerve is the superhighway connecting body to brain. Intuition is not mystical. It is biological. It is trainable. -A working framework to tell fear from the body's signal. Fear is loud, anxious, and future-focused. Intuition is calm, clear, and rooted in the now. In a startup environment where those two voices compete constantly, knowing the difference is a genuine competitive edge. The I.N.N.E.R. Framework™, a five-step proprietary system developed by Shepherd: Spirit-Led Advisory: Intentional Quiet, Noticing Patterns, Navigating with Trust, Embodiment, and Refinement. A skillset, not a mindset. Trainable like a muscle. Applicable immediately. -A live activation in the room. Attendees do not just hear about intuition. They practice it. Using a guided somatic exercise, they surface an answer they already have but have not acted on. Most people name it the most useful ten minutes of the conference. -Logic built the systems we are trying to change, and you cannot spreadsheet your way to a startup revolution. Rhode Island founders are building the next wave of what is possible. This talk gives them a tool they probably have not thought of as a tool before, and one they will use for the rest of their careers.
Emily Levy
How to Mindfully Work With a Consultant
Mindfully Hiring a Consultant is a 90-minute, single-session workshop for founders and organizational leaders who are bringing in outside expertise for the first time, or trying to make those relationships work better than they have in the past. Consultants can be a powerful investment, but most engagements go sideways, not because of the consultant but because the organization wasn't clear on what it actually needed before signing anything. This workshop walks participants through how to identify real needs versus perceived ones, write a statement of work that protects both parties, set expectations from day one, and ensure the deliverables are actually used once the engagement ends.
Ellie Brown
Marketing Clarity for Founders: What to Do, Track, and Ignore
Marketing shouldn’t feel like guesswork, but for most founders, it does. I've designed a practical session to help early-stage founders understand what marketing is actually responsible for, which metrics matter most early on, and how to build a simple operating model they can implement immediately. Here's what I cover: - Why marketing feels confusing - What marketing is responsible for - Key metrics that matter early - How GTM has changed - A simple marketing operating model founders can steal Who this is for: Startup founders, CEOs, early-stage operators, and anyone responsible for growth who wants clarity and traction without the fluff!
Marlena Sarunac
From Idea to App: AI-Assisted Development for Non-Technical Entrepreneurs
Turn your app idea into a working prototype, no coding background required. In this 90-minute hands-on workshop, non-technical founders will discover how AI-assisted development (often called "vibe coding") is reshaping what's possible for solo entrepreneurs and small teams. You'll learn what vibe coding is and where it shines (MVPs, prototypes, internal tools, and the emerging "software for one" concept), how to choose between leading platforms like Lovable for web apps and FlutterFlow for mobile, and how Supabase can power your backend with databases, authentication, and file storage. The centerpiece is a live build demo where we take a simple app idea from prompt to deployed URL in real time, covering effective prompt-writing, the iterative refine-and-rebuild process, and basic troubleshooting when things go sideways. You'll leave with a confidence to start prototyping your own ideas the moment you walk out the door.
Joe Mazzone
URI Innovations Showcase
This event will bring together academia with investors and industry partners to showcase startups, founders, researchers and professors at URI who have developed innovative and inspiring work. This will be a great opportunity to connect with the entrepreneurial ecosystem and provide you with a glimpse of current startups developing innovative products, as well as emerging projects that are in their early stages. Our goal is to bring the ecosystem together, light a spark and see what we can inspire when you put entrepreneurial talent and great partners in the room together.
