TechBBQ 2025 “Build to Matter”

Yet, they’ve managed to retain their intimacy and relevance for everyone from emerging entrepreneurs to CEOs of unicorns. My experience this year was no different. In an era of hype cycles and shrinking credibility, TechBBQ 2025’s through-line was trust by design. That means building with your communities and treating failure as feedback—while re-centering curiosity and joy as renewable fuel for the journey.

TechBBQ 2025: Build to Matter was all about building with intention by understanding what and who we’re building with. The real magic of this tech conference is that it brings great thinkers and doers together, making it possible for intimate conversations to happen through formal interviews as well as in spontaneous interactions.

As business thinker and longtime advocate for more human-centered companies, Tim Oliver Leberecht, reminds us, “We need to not only build for growth and efficiency, but for beauty.”

Start with trust (design it, don’t assume it’s already there)

We’re all swimming in noise—misinformation, deepfakes, and headlines engineered for outrage. In that kind of feed, credibility isn’t inherited; it’s earned. People believe people, and they believe what they can verify. That’s why trust has to be designed into the product, not tacked on as a feature.

For Erin Danielle Reddick, founder of ChatBlackGPT is an AI assistant that centers knowledge from Black, African American, and African sources. It’s built to handle the topics that matter to these communities with cultural fluency, care, and respect.

This large language model (LLM) meets people with patience, vetted sources, and practical next steps to their inquiries, answering loaded questions with care and then pointing readers to resources so learning continues. That approach also reduces the emotional labor often placed on Black communities to explain and educate. Erin calls the method “community resonance engineering”: a blueprint built on continuous feedback loops and cultural alignment that others can adapt for their own communities.

it’s not just her product that aims for this, it’s built into her process too, “Strive to be the host, not the hero,” she says, relaying advice from a mentor she took to heart. In practice, that looks like open forums, real listening, and building alongside the people most affected by the problem, not just for them. It can be vulnerable as a solo founder to do this, but Reddick admits that she was pleasantly surprised when she moved to a new city and put out a call, it was answered. “I had like 15 people show up in a city that I have only been in for a few weeks. That's amazing. I don't do a bunch of paid advertising. I want purely organic draw.” She went on to say that collaboration can be free flowing when you build that trust with people, “I think organically connecting with people and giving people an opportunity to speak their minds without any judgment or any real lead into what you're trying to get from them—you're just collaborating in a way that is so free flowing and that qualitative data can be used to get an essence of an underlying theme.” And that’s a great way to build a product.

Trust-by-design:

• Write a one-sentence promise: who it’s for and what problem you’re solving.
• Add a simple “Does / Doesn’t” box to your site or doc—no buzzwords.
• Share one proof people can check (before/after, time saved, fewer steps).
• Host a 30-minute open forum and post a quick “You said → We did” within a week.

Build with communities

Which brings me to a conversation that cut through the noise. Before the conference, Glen Cameron, founder of Bonded, reached out through the event app to talk about his work. I’ll admit: at first, I misunderstood the value proposition and asked some pretty challenging questions. Instead of getting defensive, he invited me to a one-to-one. The product clicked—not because of a flashy demo, but because the use case is deeply human.

He pointed to stories like John's (a pseudonym), a skilled tech professional from Ghana who needed to join his wife in the U.K. while she pursued a Ph.D. in Glasgow. To prove their ongoing relationship for his visa, he built an exhaustive archive—417MB of birth records, finances, travel history, messages, and photos—yet still hit rejection and long delays. The process wasn’t just slow; it was emotionally draining and costly, taking months to assemble.

Bonded starts from a simple observation: most identity is static and individual, while real life is dynamic and relational. Immigration systems still ask people to prove relationships with screenshots and letters—analog evidence that’s exhausting to assemble and increasingly easy to fake in a deepfake world. Bonded’s bet is a time-based, verifiable “proof of human relationship”: AI helps collect, translate, and organize evidence; cryptographic timestamps record how that story unfolds over time. The result is a clean, scrollable timeline that triangulates signals (messages, travel, photos, receipts you choose to include) into something a caseworker can actually assess. Think of it as “proof in your pocket” when you need it most—at a border, in an interview, or when stress makes it hard to recall the details.

Privacy isn’t an afterthought. Users hold their own data, with clear controls (including a kill switch) and a design that aims to meet strict data standards from the start. That matters for dignity as much as compliance.

The community piece shows up in how they plan to grow. Bonded isn’t trying to be the hero of every use case. By opening the stack, they’re inviting others to build adjacent tools—whether that’s fairer pathways in immigration today or creative rights, cross-border checks, and “relational passports” tomorrow. Start with the human conversation, co-design with people who carry the most risk, then turn the pattern into shared infrastructure others can stand on.

Build with communities:

• Create a Community Advisory Circle (5–7 people most affected) with decision rights over one roadmap item per quarter.
• Co-write a one-page problem brief with them (assumptions + “what good looks like”) before you build.
• Run a 4-week pilot with 10–20 real users and pre-agree what gets kept, changed, or killed afterward.

Failure as the ignition for trust

All entrepreneurs strive for success, but it’s not guaranteed. But the one thing common to all entrepreneurs is failure. Many entrepreneurs adopt the strategy of building in public, and failure is certainly a part of that process. Shakila Shaheen takes this to the next level by failing in public, speaking from a deeply personal place.

Despite the vulnerability it takes, Shaheen claims it’s essential to building resilience and eventual success. She relates how until she had actually failed at building a startup, she hadn’t allowed herself to fail. She went on to say, “To be honest, at one point I was very proud of not having failures, but I'm not proud anymore because I think that failures are a part of the journey. They're a big part of the learnings that you make. And if you are really, really good and smart, you start failing.”

The shift is to treat failure as learning, not a stigma you need to hide. You can grow your credibility when you can point to what changed because of the miss—what you stopped, what you redesigned, what you’ll try next. That transparency builds trust with the people you serve.

Here’s how to turn that mindset into motion. After a setback, make the learning visible while it’s fresh. Take five minutes to write down what happened, why it mattered, and one thing you’ll change—it doesn’t need to be a manifesto; a few honest lines will do. Share a short note with your team or advisors so the learning doesn’t live in your head alone. Before your next release, run a quick pre-mortem: name three ways the idea could go sideways and add one small guardrail for each. Then keep the stakes low by shipping smaller bets—a one-week pilot with a clear keep/kill/iterate decision. This rhythm turns abstract “resilience” into a practical habit your community can see.

And there will be days when there isn’t a tidy fix, and Shaheen is here for it, “Sometimes you just have to sit with it… separate yourself from it.” That pause isn’t avoidance; it’s discipline. Step back, cool off, and decide what’s actually in your control. Set a time to re-assess, and when you’re ready, offer a calm update: here’s what happened, here’s what we’re evaluating, here’s when you’ll hear from us again. Shaheen's candor about failing in public models exactly this—owning the moment without theatrics, and returning with a clearer plan.

When you treat failure as shared learning rather than a private shame. You don’t just recover, you deepen trust with the people you’re building for.

Remember that whatever good intentions, planning and preparation you do, you’ll still encounter failure. The mindset you adopt when grappling with failure is crucial to learning and adapting.

To do:

• Run a pre-mortem before your next release. List three ways it could go wrong and add one guardrail/test for each.
• Do a 5-minute post-mortem after any miss. Write: what happened, why it mattered, one change you’ll make. Share a one-line learning with your team.
• When there’s no quick fix, pause on purpose. Take a 24-hour cool-off, then post a calm update: what happened, what you’re evaluating, and when you’ll report back.

Always come back to joy and awe

What’s the antidote to fear and failure?

Joy.

No one actively cultivates joy in business more than Tim Oliver Leberecht. He’s a German-American author, three-time TED speaker, and a passionate voice for a human future of business. In 2017 he co-founded the House of Beautiful Business, an initiative devoted to bringing more beauty and humanity into work. His call to entrepreneurs is simple yet disarming: make room for the things that make us feel alive, not just the things that make a spreadsheet look good.

One way Leberecht accesses joy is through awe. He points to awe as an underused lever in work and life—research shows it can mobilize social change and even improve business outcomes.“Awe is amazing. So it's essentially this idea that you are exposed to a vastness that makes you feel humble but then at the same time belong to some transcendent quality.” Whether it’s the flow of building something that truly helps people or like for Leberecht, a personal “cathedral” moment outside work, like stepping into a football stadium, awe is something anyone can cultivate.

Joy and awe aren’t perks you sprinkle on at the end; they’re practices. Leberecht talks about small rituals that bring tenderness back into the workday: a minute of silence to close a meeting, a short writing reflection before a tough decision, reading a user story aloud so the team remembers the human on the other side of the screen. These moments are tiny, but they create felt progress. They remind people why the product exists and who it’s for.

This isn’t about ignoring hard things. It’s about meeting them with a steadier center. Erin Danielle Reddick captures that mindset perfectly, “For me, it doesn't get hard. It gets challenging and being challenged is a motivator for me. Like I get really excited when shit hits the fan…I giggle when most people panic. It's just being able to embrace ambiguity, being able to live in your stream of consciousness, but in a way where you empower yourself with knowing you can learn anything.”

Her reaction isn’t flippant. It represents a keen practice that allows you to think with an open mind.

Just remember: joy and awe aren’t perks; they keep teams honest, resilient, and creative enough to build what matters.Build awe and joy into your work:

• Embed as practice: micro-rituals (silence, writing), celebrate community wins, design for moments of felt progress.
• Add one awe ritual this week (silent closing; gratitude round; user story read-out).
• Celebrate a community win publicly (credit names; show before/after).

Last thoughts from TechBBQ

If there’s a takeaway for founders, it’s this: start small, start honest. Host, don’t hero. Let your community co-shape what you build. Tell the truth about your misses and what changed because of them. And make space for the moments that widen your view.

Despite the breadth and scope of TechBBQ, I measured the experience in the small moments—the impromptu hallway chats, the questions that made people pause, the stories that were simple and human.

Build to Matter brought founders together who were willing to get vulnerable by showing their work publicly, even when it was raw and unfinished. Designing for trust, inviting communities into the process, admitting when things broke, and finding enough joy to keep going—these are the things that matter.