Chris Yeh

Entrepreneur, Writer, and Mentor

Chris Yeh is the co-founder of the Blitzscaling Academy, which teaches individuals and organizations how to plan for and execute on hypergrowth, and of Blitzscaling Ventures, which invests in the world’s fastest-growing startups.  Chris has founded, advised, or invested in over 100 high-tech startups since 1995, including companies like Ustream (investor, advisor, CEO) and UserTesting.com (advisor).  He is the co-author, along with Reid Hoffman, of Blitzscaling: The Lightning-fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies, and the co-author, along with Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, of the New York Times bestseller, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age.  Chris earned two degrees from Stanford University, with distinction in both, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was named a Baker Scholar.

  • Chris Yeh Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $20,001 - $30,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    California, USA

  • Chris Yeh Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $20,001 - $30,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    California, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

Navigating AI Transformation Amidst Hype And Fear

Leaders are bombarded daily by AI hucksters and doomsayers, alternating feverish utopianism and existential terror. Employees are torn between using AI to supercharge their productivity and fearing obsolescence. Chris Yeh cuts through this maelstrom of contradictory extremes ...

Leaders are bombarded daily by AI hucksters and doomsayers, alternating feverish utopianism and existential terror. Employees are torn between using AI to supercharge their productivity and fearing obsolescence. Chris Yeh cuts through this maelstrom of contradictory extremes by explaining how AI technology actually works, how it will evolve, and how you can apply the lessons of past technology waves, from the industrial revolution onwards, to adapt to today’s challenges.

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Blitzscaling

LinkedIn cofounder, legendary investor, and host of the award-winning Masters of Scale podcast reveals the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies. What entrepreneur or founder doesn’t aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb...

LinkedIn cofounder, legendary investor, and host of the award-winning Masters of Scale podcast reveals the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies.

What entrepreneur or founder doesn’t aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb?  Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare.  So what separates the startups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants?

The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. The objective of Blitzscaling is not to go from zero to one, but from one to one billion –as quickly as possible.

When growing at a breakneck pace, getting to next level requires very different strategies from those that got you to where you are today. In a book inspired by their popular class at Stanford Business School, Hoffman and Yeh  reveal how to navigate the necessary shifts and weather the unique challenges that arise at each stage of a company’s life cycle, such as: how to design business models for igniting and sustaining relentless growth; strategies for hiring and managing; how the role of the founder and company culture must evolve as the business matures, and more.

Whether your business has ten employees or ten thousand, Blitzscaling is the essential playbook for winning in a world where speed is the only competitive advantage that matters.

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The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Network Age

If you want to recruit, train, and retain the best people for your company, understand this: the old employer employee compact is dead. Stability doesn’t rule. In today’s entrepreneurial age, the best employees are not pledging lifelong loyalty to your company. Instead, ...

If you want to recruit, train, and retain the best people for your company, understand this: the old employer employee compact is dead. Stability doesn’t rule. In today’s entrepreneurial age, the best employees are not pledging lifelong loyalty to your company. Instead, they want to be “entrepreneurial” at work — and they’ll readily leave if they don’t feel like they are growing personally and professionally.

Don’t shy away from this reality; embrace it. Entrepreneurial employees drive business success. These are the creative, adaptive superstars who make your company adaptive. Learn from Silicon Valley, which has long nurtured this kind of talent via a different sort of HR strategy.

In a seminar based on his forthcoming book from Harvard Business Review Press, bestselling author and Chief of Staff to LinkedIn founder/chairman Reid Hoffman, Ben presents a revolutionary way to make a new people pact work for your company. You will learn:

How to create a mutually beneficial relationship between your company and employees that’s based on reciprocity – a two-way flow of value.

•  How to craft 2-4 year “tours of duty” with your key employees that ultimately boosts retention.
•  Why it’s a good thing for your employees to keep their LinkedIn profiles up-to-date.
•  The surprising importance of a “corporate alumni network” — and how to form one for your own
organization.
•  The little things that Netflix, Amazon, LinkedIn and others do to support entrepreneurial employees who
want to take risks, grow their network, and build their personal brand while working a 9-5 job.

Every adaptive company has a 21st century talent and HR strategy. Ben presents a bold guide for building your own.

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Fireside Chat: The Entrepreneurial Cycle of Life and the Hidden Secrets of Startups

You can’t replicate Silicon Valley, but you can learn from it. In the startup ecosystem entrepreneurs are the essential element and everyone else is a provider. Only one out of every ten companies will go on to receive investor funding and only one in ten of those will ...

You can’t replicate Silicon Valley, but you can learn from it. In the startup ecosystem entrepreneurs are the essential element and everyone else is a provider. Only one out of every ten companies will go on to receive investor funding and only one in ten of those will become a hit. So against this backdrop how does an entrepreneur become successful, remain successful and keep his or her sanity?

In this program, Chris will discuss the lessons he has learned from shepherding startups for the past 19 plus years. He will cover strategies for marketing a product “pre-startup” and follow up marketing strategies like “The 7 steps to prelaunch marketing,” dealing with investor uncertainty, drip marketing and much more.

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About Keynote Speaker Chris Yeh

Chris Yeh is a respected Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, mentor, and writer.  He is a co-author with LinkedIn founder/chairman Reid Hoffman and bestselling author Ben Casnocha of the New York Times bestselling book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, which sprang from their article in Harvard Business Review entitled Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact. He has been blogging since 2001, both on his personal blogs and as a guest author in outlets like TechCrunch, Mashable, and VentureBeat, and has written over 2,000 posts on topics ranging from the psychology of entrepreneurship to achieving happiness in Silicon Valley.

In addition to his writing, Chris has founded, funded, or advised over 50 startups, including Ustream, the world’s leading live video platform.  Chris earned two Bachelor’s degrees with distinction from Stanford University (Product Design Engineering and Creative Writing) and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was named a Baker Scholar.

More About Speaker, Chris Yeh . . .
Fun Facts:

  • He was born and grew up in Santa Monica, California.
  • He attended the Mirman School for Gifted Children, where he was a friend and classmate of Masi Oka from NBC’s “Heroes” and CBS’s “Hawaii Five-O”.
  • He attended Santa Monica High School, where he was classmates with a nondescript fellow named Carson Daly.
  • He graduated Class of 1994 from Stanford University, where he was classmates with entrepreneurs such as PayPal and Yammer co-founder David O. Sacks, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
  • He worked for D. E. Shaw & Co., where he sat in the cubicle next to best-selling science fiction novelist Naomi Novik.

He was profiled as one of the Top 5 Web 2.0 pioneers under the age of 40 by TheDeal.com

Testimonials

Chris was absolutely amazing with his keynote address and moderating of his panel.  You can’t imagine how many people came up to me afterwards and said that Chris was the best keynote they had ever heard. He was not only able to talk about topics in VC and investors (challenging – to some in the audience) in a very human down to earth way, but Chris was able to relate these topics to the audience, which was greatly appreciated.

Brian Suh

Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC)

“Chris is one of the most creative and innovative managers I’ve met in many a year. I’ve seen outstanding creative and monetarily rewarding results of many of his programs. A leader in the community.”.

Jayne Lange, CEO at Diversified Portfolio Group

 

“Chris has provided relentless energy and follow-through to deliver on a vision. He is impressively quick at building and motivating teams of people to explore new business directions. It’s something to be in awe of!”

David E. Weekly, Product Manager, Founder, Community Evangelist, Hacker, Drone VC

 

Chris did a phenomenal job of combining both an entertaining, high-energy presentation with leading a highly interactive and customized discussion of key talent management issues, pull of specific advice, and real-world examples.  He even stayed after his presentation to have lunch with the attendees and continue the conversation.  Our customers raved about the content and Chris’ engaging style.  We’ve already booked him for several more key customer meetings in the coming months.

Alex Cresswell

LinkedIn

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