Latest news with #networking
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
3 more days to fuel your next big move — and save up to $210 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass
The countdown is on — you have just 3 days left to save on your pass to TechCrunch All Stage, happening July 15 in Boston's SoWa Power Station. After Sunday, June 22 at 11:59 p.m. PT, prices go up, and this opportunity to lock in savings disappears. If you're a founder looking to scale, a VC hunting for breakout talent, or an operator ready to level up, this one-day founder summit is built to move you forward — with tactical insights, candid conversations, and high-impact networking from start to finish. Register here to save $210 on your Founder pass and $200 on your Investor pass. TC All Stage isn't about buzzwords and big stages. It's where builders meet backers and real strategy takes center stage. You'll experience: Here's just a sample of the speakers and sessions on tap, but keep checking the full speaker lineup on the event site as big names are being added daily. Prices go up Sunday, June 22, at 11:59 p.m. PT — don't miss your chance to save. Join founders and investors at every stage in Boston for a full day of growth-focused programming at TechCrunch All Stage. Make your move while there's still time. Grab your pass before prices go up. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Forbes
7 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Cisco Live 2025 Touts Cisco's Platform Advantages For Enterprise AI
Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel presents at Cisco Live 2025. At last week's Cisco Live in San Diego, CEO Chuck Robbins said that it would be the most important Cisco Live ever and announce more innovations than ever. Having attended a ton of these events and followed the company closely for many years, I can tell you that the show mostly fulfilled that promise. More than that, it reinforced Cisco's areas of strategic focus in infrastructure, the modern workplace and digital resiliency. It's clear that Cisco is working hard to leverage its platform advantages across networking, security, observability, compute and even silicon to support agentic AI workloads. This should help customers simplify operations while maintaining the highest levels of network security and AI safety. As I pointed out in my analysis of the Cisco Partner Summit held late in 2024, Cisco was very deliberate — perhaps a touch slow — in establishing its overarching AI strategy. By now, though, I'm impressed with how quickly the company has been moving to bring this strategy to fruition. Let's dig into the details of what Cisco is doing, and what it could still do better. (Note: Cisco is an advisory client of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.) Cisco's Strategic Imperatives, Per Robbins And Patel Early on, Robbins made the fundamental point that networking is critical for AI to function, and will be a big factor in enabling AI growth going forward. Beyond that, agentic AI will be adequately secured only by applying security to the network. In this context, Robbins scored a direct hit on Cisco's competitors when he pointed out that 'None of our network friends have security and none of our security friends have networking.' He believes (and I agree) that this puts Cisco in a unique position to help integrate security into the network, which I think is going to be especially important in enterprise IT. AI is growing like wildfire against a backdrop of global turmoil. Robbins said that geopolitical dynamics are a big concern for Cisco, noting that AI competition isn't just between companies, but between nations as well. Whether companies or countries, everyone has FOMO, and everyone feels like they need to move fast. (He said that 85% of enterprises believe they must 'do AI' in the next 18 months.) This reminds me that most of my conversations at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos were spent discussing countries' needs for a disconnected, sovereign AI cloud. The need is there. A new type of infrastructure will be required to realize the potential of generative and especially agentic AI. According to Robbins, we need a similar kind of advancement in infrastructure that happened when the internet became ubiquitous in the 1990s. It's worth pausing here to reflect on how important that period of technology was for turning Cisco into a networking juggernaut. Here in the 2020s, this is going to play out with a hybrid strategy that includes both cloud hyperscalers and private enterprise datacenters. For meeting this need, Robbins told the crowd not to underestimate the impact of Cisco's combined strengths in networking, security and silicon. (In my view, Cisco needs to talk more often and in more detail about the silicon part. I'll come back to that in my recommendations at the end of this article.) After the CEO's keynote was done, Cisco's chief product officer — and newly appointed president — Jeetu Patel took the stage and echoed Robbins with his emphasis on: He later gave much more detail on each of those facets, as I'll cover below. But first he talked about how the ability of AI agents to autonomously execute tasks will compound productivity, especially when combined with advances in robotics, AI and other areas. As he put it, '8 billion [people] will feel like 80 billion.' However, this productivity explosion will be constrained by limits in power, networking and compute. He also foresees a growing divide between companies that are dexterous with AI and those that will struggle. 'We want to help you be in that first category,' Patel said. He's making a very timely prediction. I presented to a group of European CIOs earlier this week in Munich, and one of the slides showed logos of companies that 'died' from not embracing the internet and e-commerce. The same will happen to companies that don't quickly embrace AI. You don't have to be first, but you can't be last. How can Cisco help? Patel brought it back to the compounding effect of Cisco's platform approach, where many different types of complementary technology work 'in harmony.' He referenced the company's silicon (so customers aren't stuck with a single provider) and especially programmable silicon (to adapt to new use cases). He also reiterated a point he had made in the 2024 Cisco Partner Summit — that AI is foundational to Cisco's products, so customers can expect it to be built right in. While I think that's an accurate thing to say, I would also suggest that by now it's not such a point of differentiation. The Need For AI-Ready Infrastructure Patel went into more detail about the massive, even exponential, buildout of datacenters underway right now. He said that Cisco is foundational in building out these new datacenters. For datacenters to support large-scale agentic AI, they need a new architecture that can support the constant high levels of AI model activity that agentic creates. This is unlike generative AI chatbots, where the activity spikes up and down. Patel believes that the company can take advantage of the opportunity based on the experience it has gained from many years of serving hyperscalers/CSPs, neoclouds and enterprise customers. In support of my praise for Cisco's impressive speed lately, Patel touted the 19 major datacenter innovations the company has launched just within the past six months. At Cisco Live, it announced the unified Nexus Dashboard, which creates 'one brain for all of our data center fabrics,' according to Patel. There was also plenty of talk about the company's partnership with AI bellwether Nvidia. Among other aspects of the pairing, Cisco switches are completely integrated into Nvidia architecture, and Nvidia NeMo models can be secured with Cisco AI Defense. As I have said before, I am a recovering product management and product marketing executive, and I always challenge tech companies to describe their product realization process. While Cisco gets criticized for its 'legacy' roots, Patel has very much changed the product culture there. Fewer layers and faster time-to-decision. Most of the new software underlying AI was developed by small teams with six to eight members. This is a new practice — and very much a new Cisco. I will be digging more into the metrics and outcomes as they're available, but I like what I hear so far. Given that this is Cisco we're talking about, that was just the tip of the iceberg for cybersecurity. Patel described security as a prerequisite for enterprise AI because 'If people don't trust the system, they're not going to use it.' There was also an announcement about the Hybrid Mesh Firewall, which enables distributed policy enforcement, adds security to all sorts of devices and can work with existing firewalls (even from third parties). There were other announcements of specific firewalls, and Patel asserted that Cisco is the price-performance leader for firewalls at every level of scale. The company also launched a new secure network architecture called Cisco Live Protect, which is meant to shield your network from an exploit within minutes to give your IT security team time to fix the underlying issue. The contrast between 'within minutes' and the industrywide 45-day average to patch a vulnerability is striking, to say the least. You can read more in this analysis from my colleague Will Townsend, who's an expert on networking and cybersecurity. Our colleague Matt Kimball, who has a long background in datacenters, will also be publishing his analysis soon. Networking And Equipping The Workplace Of Tomorrow This part of the presentation bridged various aspects of networking for enterprises, where Patel said the priorities were operational simplicity, scalability and — once again — security infused into the network. He got some cheers when he announced that Cisco's Catalyst switches are now unified with its Meraki network platform; there's now a single dashboard for managing these along with all of Cisco's next-gen devices. From my perspective, this is a nice example of Cisco's growing emphasis on easing the customer/user experience. In that vein, there was also an impressive demo of the new AgenticOps platform, which includes a multiplayer management console called AI Canvas. Will Townsend wrote much more about this in his article, praising its 'dynamic and real-time view into the inner workings of a customer's infrastructure expanse' to manage the network assurance, observability and remediation supplied by other Cisco tools. The live demo showed a user fetching data on a network outage and making UI widgets in real time to manage it. The engineer using it walked through troubleshooting, then inviting other users to help — with an autogenerated AI summary of what had been done so far. The AI model recognized missing data and looked for it, and then it was easy to apply a patch straight from the dashboard. Even a non-engineer like me could see immediately how helpful this console would be. Patel is not afraid to use hyperbole when it's warranted, so he summarized the impact of AgenticOps by saying, 'The way in which you run your network will never be the same again.' And he promised that much more innovation like this is coming through the pipeline. There was a lot more, including 'one of the largest refreshes of networking devices in Cisco history.' This includes smart switches, secure routers, WiFi 7 gear, campus gateways, industrial IoT . . . if you can network it, Cisco wants to do it smarter. For example, the new smart switches have isolated compute so you can run things like security right on the switch, plus all of the devices act as sensors that provide information about their environment back to the system. Harnessing Data And AI To Fortify Digital Resilience When the conversation turned to digital resilience, Patel and other presenters continued the theme of bringing more data into the picture to keep infrastructure running well. Enterprises routinely expend many hours determining the causes of outages; in Patel's view, the friction of this process is created by not having the right data available. 'One of the reasons we acquired Splunk for the low price of $28 billion,' he said, 'was to take all this data across multiple domains and correlate it.' He added that the core method of digital resilience is to distill data, correlate it, then unleash AI on the problem. There were plenty of specifics in terms of new launches, new Splunk integrations and so on, not to mention using smaller, more efficient bespoke AI models for specific security needs. (Those Cisco folks really are building AI into everything.) But for me there were two big takeaways from this part of the show. First is the idea of reimagining security operations by performing security at machine scale, and consolidating and simplifying security solutions to make that easier. Second is the extension of observability to AI. Some aspects of AI may still be 'black boxes' in terms of what the algorithms are doing, but Cisco wants to give its customers the ability to see everything their AIs are doing in terms of compute usage, network traffic, power draw and so on. If the company is able to pull off everything talked about onstage, I think that can only help with operationalizing AI to yield real business results for enterprises. Messaging All This AI Innovation Cisco Live reminds me a little bit of Google Cloud Next in terms of the sheer number of announcements packed into a couple of days. And it makes sense, given that both Cisco and Google Cloud (a) operate across multiple product areas with many different individual offerings in them, and (b) are investing enormous amounts of bandwidth (and capex) into AI — at speed. There are a couple of risks I see for Cisco. First, yes, the company's leaders told us repeatedly that AI is 'foundational' in their products. But it's one thing to claim this — as do most of the big infrastructure providers and enterprise software vendors. And the demos were great. But it's another thing to accurately engage with the market as a whole and with individual customers to help them understand the many potential payoffs for Cisco's AI innovations, area by area and product by product. I have great faith in Cisco's go-to-market prowess, but there's so much coming down the pike so fast that, to be most successful, the company needs to do the very best job of explaining its wares that it's ever done. Maybe it's my background in semiconductors talking, but I see this especially in how Cisco talks about its in-house silicon. In my view, Cisco doesn't blow this trumpet as loudly or as often as it should. The company announced its Silicon One initiative in 2019, and has been shipping its own chips for years by this point . . . yet there still aren't enough people who know about it. And look at the valuations of AI chip companies today. So I urge the company to talk more about its chips and how they add to the differentiation of Cisco's portfolio. The good news is, the introduction of all this AI functionality from Cisco — and the sea change underway in AI datacenter infrastructure — offers a perfect opportunity to do this. Cisco has some unique advantages in the market, starting with Chuck Robbins' correct and fundamental assertion that no one else in networking can match Cisco in security, and no one else in cybersecurity can match Cisco for networking. I'm also impressed by the waves of smart, relevant, user-friendly products I see at each Cisco event I attend. Now I want to see just how well Cisco can market, message and sell all this goodness into the enterprise.
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Boston Side Events lineup at TechCrunch All Stage with Fidelity Private Shares, Women Tech Meetup, Prepare 4 VC, and more
Get ready to amplify your TechCrunch All Stage 2025 experience with the electrifying lineup of Side Events taking Boston by storm during the week of July 13–19. As the countdown to TC All Stage begins, we're thrilled to share our Side Events lineup, where you can foster meaningful connections within the vibrant Boston tech community. Whether you're a seasoned industry pro or a budding entrepreneur, our Side Events promise an unforgettable week filled with networking opportunities, innovation showcases, and engaging conversations. So mark your calendars, secure your spot, and dive into the excitement of TC All Stage Week like never before! Quick Side Event disclaimers: Hosted by: Palm Venture StudiosTime: 3:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. ET The startup life can be a lonely journey — this is a night to come together, have some fun, and remember you're not alone in riding the roller coaster of building. Just founders sharing real stories and the lessons they learned the hard way. – Drinks and food– Networking– Real founders, real stories Hosted by: WithumTime: 5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. ET Kick off TechCrunch Boston with Withum, UBS and a dynamic group of founders for a fast-paced, 30-minute fireside chat for tech founders. We'll cover what matters most right now, from an economic update to breaking down QSBS stock, equity structures, and insights from the proposed One Big Beautiful also hear directly from startup founders as they share lessons learned, growth strategies, and how they're building in today's evolving landscape. Join us for candid conversation, real takeaways, and meaningful connections with fellow tech entrepreneurs in a high-energy, founder-first setting. Start your TechCrunch Boston experience with an impactful fireside chat covering today's economic climate, QSBS, equity insights, and real-world advice from startup leaders. Hosted by: American South Asian Network (ASAN)Time: 5:15 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. ETJoin us for an engaging evening of networking, insightful discussions, and cultural celebration. Connect with South Asian entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals, and explore the vibrant contributions of the South Asian community across various industries. More details on our registration page! REGISTER HERE Hosted by: Women Tech Meetup, Techstars, Puzzle, and Venture LaneTime: 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. ETBoston! Calling all women in tech, allies, friends, and partners! Join our Women Tech Meetup: Raising on Your Terms, hosted by Techstars and Venture Lane, as an official Side Event of TechCrunch All Stage. Enjoy complimentary drinks and snacks, engaging conversations, networking, and a beautiful venue Additionally, we will host a panel discussion on fundraising, venture capital, and the challenges that female founders face on their journey to building successful companies, along with strategies to overcome them. Agenda listed on our registration page. REGISTER HERE Hosted by: Puzzle and Fidelity Private SharesTime: 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. ETCome hungry. Leave inspired. Building a startup is a wild ride — so let's hit pause and and connect over great food and even better company Join us for our special breakfast as a Side Event of TechCrunch All Stage, designed for founders navigating the highs and lows of scaling, fundraising, and everything in between. Co-hosted by Puzzle and Fidelity Private Shares. Swap lessons learned and insider tips, biggest wins and toughest challenges, as well as fresh perspectives with fellow founders who truly get it. REGISTER HERE Hosted by: Prepare 4 VCTime: 11:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. ETThe Breakthrough Summit is the grand finale of the Prepare 4 VC Breakthrough Program — a 10-week founder acceleration journey that pushes beyond theory into transformative action. This isn't a demo day. This is a celebration of resilience, growth, and traction. You're invited to witness 10 bold, ambitious founding teams as they take the stage to share:– Their pitch-ready ventures.– Personal breakthrough moments.– Traction gained through the program.– The next big leaps they're preparing for. All framed by the powerful community of mentors, investors, and partners who made it possible. REGISTER HERE Hosted by: Onshape by PTCTime: 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. ETJoin us for our next Happy Hour event with early-stage founders, top investors, and engineers shaping the future of product design. Hear from Jon Hirschtick and John McEleney, co-founders of SolidWorks and Onshape, in a panel session on building, scaling, and fundraising for venture-backed startups. Plus, hear firsthand from AWS on how to build scalable, secure infrastructure for your startup. Whether you're in Boston for TechCrunch All Stage or building your breakthrough product, you won't want to miss this! REGISTER HERE Hosted by: Æthos FoundationTime: 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. ETJoin our ecosystem for an evening of guiding society towards AI that truly serve humanity, and for drinks. An entrepreneur, a professor, and a public servant walk into a bar… Come see whether they walk out with a new understanding of what makes AI responsible. Æthos has built AI startup hubs in Boston and Berlin over the past year around a mission to construct strong practical norms for ethical AI. We bring together start ups with leaders from government, big tech, academia, and investment to build these norms. The usual place, unusual people: the best minds Boston has to offer on July 16th. REGISTER HERE Hosted by: Remotesome and DeelTime: 5:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. ETUnlock the secrets to building high-performing teams and scaling your startup with confidence. Join us for Scaling Teams Efficiently — an exclusive event bringing together leaders from top venture capital firms and growth-stage startups to share their unfiltered experiences on what truly drives success after funding rounds. You can find more info on expectations, agenda, etc., on our registration page. REGISTER HERE Hosted by: Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and DesignTime: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. ETPlease join us for this engaging panel discussion with local thought leaders about best practices to engage with universities to empower business growth. After the panel, there will be an opportunity to network with fellow founders, university representatives, and students. Please come prepared for a lively discussion with an open mind and lots of questions! REGISTER HERE
TechCrunch
10 hours ago
- Business
- TechCrunch
Boston Side Events lineup at TechCrunch All Stage with Fidelity Private Shares, Women Tech Meetup, Prepare 4 VC, and more
Get ready to amplify your TechCrunch All Stage 2025 experience with the electrifying lineup of Side Events taking Boston by storm during the week of July 13–19. As the countdown to TC All Stage begins, we're thrilled to share our Side Events lineup, where you can foster meaningful connections within the vibrant Boston tech community. Whether you're a seasoned industry pro or a budding entrepreneur, our Side Events promise an unforgettable week filled with networking opportunities, innovation showcases, and engaging conversations. So mark your calendars, secure your spot, and dive into the excitement of TC All Stage Week like never before! Quick Side Event disclaimers: Registering/RSVPing to a Side Event does not grant you access/ticket/badge to the main TC All Stage 2025 conference on July 15. Each event is organized and operated solely by a host (i.e., not TC Media International or any of its affiliates or brands, including TechCrunch). Attendance is 18+ minimum and some venues are 21+ only. Side Events are open to the public unless specified. Please register/RSVP for any of the Side Events you want to attend. July 14 Startup Confessions: A Night of Founder Stories Hosted by: Palm Venture Studios Time: 3:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. ET The startup life can be a lonely journey — this is a night to come together, have some fun, and remember you're not alone in riding the roller coaster of building. Just founders sharing real stories and the lessons they learned the hard way. – Drinks and food – Networking – Real founders, real stories REGISTER HERE Tech Founders Fireside Chat Hosted by: Withum Time: 5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. ET Kick off TechCrunch Boston with Withum, UBS and a dynamic group of founders for a fast-paced, 30-minute fireside chat for tech founders. We'll cover what matters most right now, from an economic update to breaking down QSBS stock, equity structures, and insights from the proposed One Big Beautiful Bill. You'll also hear directly from startup founders as they share lessons learned, growth strategies, and how they're building in today's evolving landscape. Join us for candid conversation, real takeaways, and meaningful connections with fellow tech entrepreneurs in a high-energy, founder-first setting. Start your TechCrunch Boston experience with an impactful fireside chat covering today's economic climate, QSBS, equity insights, and real-world advice from startup leaders. REGISTER HERE Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW July 15 South Asian Collective Hosted by: American South Asian Network (ASAN) Time: 5:15 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. ET Join us for an engaging evening of networking, insightful discussions, and cultural celebration. Connect with South Asian entrepreneurs, creatives, and professionals, and explore the vibrant contributions of the South Asian community across various industries. More details on our registration page! REGISTER HERE Women Tech Meetup: Raising on Your Terms Hosted by: Women Tech Meetup, Techstars, Puzzle, and Venture Lane Time: 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. ET Boston! Calling all women in tech, allies, friends, and partners! Join our Women Tech Meetup: Raising on Your Terms, hosted by Techstars and Venture Lane, as an official Side Event of TechCrunch All Stage. Enjoy complimentary drinks and snacks, engaging conversations, networking, and a beautiful venue 🌟 Additionally, we will host a panel discussion on fundraising, venture capital, and the challenges that female founders face on their journey to building successful companies, along with strategies to overcome them. Agenda listed on our registration page. REGISTER HERE July 16 Founders Breakfast: Boston Edition Hosted by: Puzzle and Fidelity Private Shares Time: 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. ET Come hungry. Leave inspired. Building a startup is a wild ride — so let's hit pause and and connect over great food and even better company 🍽️☕ Join us for our special breakfast as a Side Event of TechCrunch All Stage, designed for founders navigating the highs and lows of scaling, fundraising, and everything in between. Co-hosted by Puzzle and Fidelity Private Shares. Swap lessons learned and insider tips, biggest wins and toughest challenges, as well as fresh perspectives with fellow founders who truly get it. REGISTER HERE Breakthrough Summit: Prepare 4 VC Graduation & Showcase Hosted by: Prepare 4 VC Time: 11:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. ET The Breakthrough Summit is the grand finale of the Prepare 4 VC Breakthrough Program — a 10-week founder acceleration journey that pushes beyond theory into transformative action. This isn't a demo day. This is a celebration of resilience, growth, and traction. You're invited to witness 10 bold, ambitious founding teams as they take the stage to share: – Their pitch-ready ventures. – Personal breakthrough moments. – Traction gained through the program. – The next big leaps they're preparing for. All framed by the powerful community of mentors, investors, and partners who made it possible. REGISTER HERE Product Design Happy Hour Hosted by: Onshape by PTC Time: 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. ET Join us for our next Happy Hour event with early-stage founders, top investors, and engineers shaping the future of product design. Hear from Jon Hirschtick and John McEleney, co-founders of SolidWorks and Onshape, in a panel session on building, scaling, and fundraising for venture-backed startups. Plus, hear firsthand from AWS on how to build scalable, secure infrastructure for your startup. Whether you're in Boston for TechCrunch All Stage or building your breakthrough product, you won't want to miss this! REGISTER HERE Æthos AI Salon Hosted by: Æthos Foundation Time: 5:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. ET Join our ecosystem for an evening of guiding society towards AI that truly serve humanity, and for drinks. An entrepreneur, a professor, and a public servant walk into a bar… Come see whether they walk out with a new understanding of what makes AI responsible. Æthos has built AI startup hubs in Boston and Berlin over the past year around a mission to construct strong practical norms for ethical AI. We bring together start ups with leaders from government, big tech, academia, and investment to build these norms. The usual place, unusual people: the best minds Boston has to offer on July 16th. REGISTER HERE Scaling Teams Effectively : Interactive Panel Discussion x Networking Hosted by: Remotesome and Deel Time: 5:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. ET Unlock the secrets to building high-performing teams and scaling your startup with confidence. Join us for Scaling Teams Efficiently — an exclusive event bringing together leaders from top venture capital firms and growth-stage startups to share their unfiltered experiences on what truly drives success after funding rounds. You can find more info on expectations, agenda, etc., on our registration page. REGISTER HERE July 17 Women in Business — Networked for Growth: Female Founders Harnessing Campus Connections Hosted by: Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design Time: 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. ET Please join us for this engaging panel discussion with local thought leaders about best practices to engage with universities to empower business growth. After the panel, there will be an opportunity to network with fellow founders, university representatives, and students. Please come prepared for a lively discussion with an open mind and lots of questions! REGISTER HERE
Forbes
11 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Break The 5,000 LinkedIn Follower Wall With Proven Growth Tactics
Break the 5,000 LinkedIn follower wall with proven growth tactics If you created your LinkedIn account a while ago, have been posting decent content, and adding new connections after meeting people in person, you could have just hit 5,000 followers or pretty close. That's the easy bit done. There's a benefit to your account being this size. LinkedIn's algorithm favours content from accounts with highly engaged followers. The data shows that accounts with under 5,000 followers (58% of LinkedIn creators) often achieve an engagement rate of nearly 6% per post, which is significantly higher than the 3% seen by accounts with over 100,000 followers. So you want to build your account beyond 5,000 followers, but you want to keep your engagement rate high. You want to break through a follower plateau and hit the next level while making it worth your while. Growing beyond 5,000 requires fundamental shifts in how you create, engage, and think about growth. Let's get intentional about growing on LinkedIn. Those accounts getting all the attention already did the hard work. They found your people. Now stop competing and start complementing. Look at what they never talk about. Maybe they skip the messy parts of running a business. Maybe they avoid pricing discussions. Those gaps become your opportunities. Create content that makes their audience need both of you. Message them directly. Propose a follower swap where you each shout out the other's email list. Run a series where you tackle the same challenge from opposite angles. Partner with three so-called "competitors" and you could triple your growth in three months. Unless you're offering identical services to the exact same audience, you're not competing. You're building an ecosystem. Your rivals have what you want. Turn them into partners and watch both accounts grow. Your audience followed you for your specific take, not recycled LinkedIn wisdom. They can get generic tips anywhere. Share the weird stuff only you know. The pricing model that shouldn't work but does. The onboarding process you invented after losing three clients. The framework you built from your biggest failure. Give your methods names. Document them so precisely someone could steal them. When you package expertise into systems nobody else teaches, every share expands your reach. Call it the "7-minute meeting method" instead of "meeting tips." Show the exact steps, the specific results, the measurable outcomes. A post about a unique sales process could get shared hundreds of times when people see an approach they've never considered. Your unique methods are your growth engine. Stop hiding them. The LinkedIn algorithm gave you a free ride to 5,000 followers. That ride's over. Now you need allies with bigger accounts who share your audience. Find creators with 10,000-20,000 followers in adjacent spaces. Comment meaningfully on their posts for a week. Then propose something they can't create alone. Add messaging that serves both audiences. Maybe you know productivity systems and they know team management. Write comments combining both, and build out carousels from the comments that do well. Host a LinkedIn Live debating opposite approaches. Your 5K sees you partnering with someone they admire. Their 15,000 discovers fresh perspective. One collaboration beats fifty solo posts. Pick partners who make your content better, not just bigger. If you've gotten this far by posting once or twice a week, it's time to scale up. There's almost a direct relationship between posting frequency and LinkedIn account size, so you might as well get involved. Every post gives you a chance to hit people with your strong beliefs and ethos in a brand new way. You never know what might land. Staying consistent on LinkedIn isn't easy. You need a proven way of creating great content three to five times a week. But crack that content system and you'll likely see consistent, week-on-week growth. Scale far beyond 5,000 followers in no time at all. Every DM holds a content idea. That founder asking about your recent results represents hundreds with the same question. The consultant confused by your tech stack speaks for a silent segment. Your inbox shows you exactly what your audience needs. Screenshot the best questions and turn them into posts. Share your detailed answer then expand with context. This guarantees relevance because real humans asked for this exact information. Track which DM topics generate the most engagement. Build weekly series around those themes. You could grow from 5,000 to 20,000 by turning DM conversations into content. Your inbox already has your next viral post. Build past 5,000 followers by throwing everything at LinkedIn and not stopping until you are growing by thousands every month. Other people have done it, and it's possible for you. Share others' brilliance with your unique lens. Explain why it matters. Add the context your audience needs. Become the filter that saves them time while establishing your takes as worth trusting. Post better stuff, more often. Suddenly, you're everywhere, adding value to conversations you didn't start. People find you and follow, and the number grows from there. Access my best ChatGPT prompts to build your personal brand.
