What if the thing that feels like failure… is actually the signal you’re on the right path?

In this talk, TaskRabbit founder Leah Solivan challenges one of the most deeply ingrained precedents in business: that success is linear. Drawing from her own journey building one of the earliest companies in the gig economy, Leah reframes the pivot not as a detour, but as the core mechanism of innovation.

Because here’s the truth: no breakthrough company is built in a straight line. But this isn’t just one founder’s story.

Through her Breaking Precedent podcast, Leah has interviewed some of today’s most influential entrepreneurs, investors, and thought leaders, and a clear pattern emerges: the most successful people don’t avoid pivots… they rely on them.

From startup founders to industry disruptors, these leaders share a common thread: an ability to recognize when something isn’t working, adapt quickly, and turn uncertainty into momentum. Leah brings these voices into the room, weaving together powerful, real-world stories that reveal how pivots are a repeatable advantage.

Audiences will walk away with:

• A new mental model for navigating pivots as a strategic advantage

• Insight into how to recognize when you’re “climbing the wrong mountain” and what to do next  

• Lessons and patterns drawn directly from top founders and innovators

• A framework for making high-stakes decisions when there is no clear precedent

• The confidence to build in ambiguity and the discipline to adapt without losing your core mission

The pivot isn’t the problem.
The pivot is the pattern.
And the pivot is the point.

"Not another AI hype talk. A practitioner's view from someone who is watching the behavior shifts happen in real time — and investing in them."

Everyone is talking about what AI will do. Leah Solivan is watching what people are already doing — how they shop, how they search, how they make hiring decisions, how they trust brands, and how they decide who to work for — and she's tracking how AI is quietly rewiring each of those behaviors right now, before most organizations have adjusted their strategies to match.

Drawing on her vantage point as an investor in AI, consumer, Fintech, and marketplace companies — and as a practitioner who ran a behavior-driven platform for a decade — Leah translates the AI signal into actionable insight for leaders who need to make real decisions today. No jargon. No utopian predictions. A clear-eyed look at where consumer and employee behavior is already changing, which organizations are getting ahead of it, and what the laggards have in common.

This talk is designed for audiences who are tired of AI hype and hungry for a grounded, non-technical frame for what it means for their teams, their customers, and their business model.

What audiences walk away with:

• A clearer picture of what's hype and what's already reshaping consumer and employee behavior in ways that matter now.

• How AI is becoming embedded in emotional, creative, and practical daily routines, and what that means for brand trust, talent retention, and customer experience.

• The early behavioral signals that indicate which AI tools and habits are about to go mainstream and how to position ahead of them rather than react to them.

• A framework for making AI strategy decisions without a technical background, built for leaders who need to act on the shift, not just understand it.

"The only talk that takes you from the founding myth all the way to what she learned inside IKEA — and what she's betting on now."

Before there was a gig economy, there was a woman on a Honda scooter in Boston, doing errands for strangers and cold-calling investors who had no framework to say yes. Leah Solivan didn't build TaskRabbit because she saw a market opportunity. She built it because she saw a human one.

In this talk, Leah traces the full arc of building a two-sided marketplace from zero — the counterintuitive lessons about supply, trust, pricing, and community that textbooks don't teach; the moment she chose IKEA over a higher-priced acquirer, and why; and what she sees now, from her seat as a Managing Director at Fuel Capital, about where platform economics and AI are taking the next generation of marketplace businesses.

This is not an origin story. It's a practitioner's guide to the decisions that actually determine whether a platform thrives or stalls — and what leaders in every industry need to understand about marketplace thinking as their own businesses face disruption.

What audiences walk away with:

• The counterintuitive decisions that determine whether a two-sided marketplace thrives or stalls, and how to apply marketplace thinking to their own business model.

• A framework for evaluating when to build, when to buy, and when to exit, drawn from the real conditions behind the IKEA acquisition.

• What platform economics and AI are doing to the next generation of marketplace businesses, and where the early signal is pointing right now.

• How to identify the trust and community dynamics that separate platforms that scale from those that plateau.

"A founder story told with honesty, not inspiration porn — for anyone who's been told to wait their turn."

Leah Solivan left a stable engineering job at IBM — with a pension check in hand — to pursue a company that hadn't been built yet, in a category that didn't have a name, for customers who didn't know they needed it. She was a woman. She was a Latina. She had no VC network, no MBA, and no roadmap. She built one anyway.

This talk is not about perseverance as an abstract virtue. It's about the specific, tactical, and often uncomfortable decisions that allow people who don't look like the default to build something significant: how to read a room that wasn't designed for you, how to find investors when warm introductions don't exist, how to construct authority from scratch, and how to refuse the ceilings other people have decided are permanent.

Leah draws on her two seasons of Breaking Precedent — in which she has interviewed 20 founders, athletes, artists, and investors who rewrote the rules of their fields — to offer a framework that is equal parts rigorous and human.

What audiences walk away with:

• Specific, tactical strategies for building credibility and access in rooms and networks that weren't designed with you in mind.

• A reframe of "breaking precedent" from a personality trait into a repeatable decision-making practice, applicable regardless of industry or background.

• How to identify and dismantle the invisible ceilings that aren't about capability and the ones that actually are.

• Practical tools for constructing authority from scratch, drawn from Leah's arc from IBM engineer to gig economy pioneer to VC, and from 20 conversations with the people who rewrote the rules in their own fields.