Ben Casnocha – Technology Entrepreneur and Executive

Topical keynote Speakers & Experts -

Ben Casnocha is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and investor in Silicon Valley. He is coauthor with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman of the recent New York Times bestseller The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, which has become one of the most sought-after management frameworks on how to recruit, manage, and retain entrepreneurial employees.

He is also co-author with Reid of The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, the leading career strategy guide that’s been translated into more than 15 languages and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

He’s co-founder and partner at Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm that invests in technology startups. Village Global has $225 million under management and hundreds of portfolio companies.

He has appeared on CNN, the CBS Early Show, CNBC and various media including The Economist, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.

Speaking Topics

1. The Alliance: How to Manage Talent in the Networked Age.

The employer-employee relationship is broken. Managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: You can’t afford to offer lifetime employment.

But you can’t build a lasting, innovative business when everyone acts like a free agent.

The solution: Stop thinking of employees as family or free agents and start thinking of them as allies on a tour of duty. 

Based on Ben’s New York Times bestselling book with Reid Hoffman, founder/chairman of LinkedIn, in this keynote he explains how to recruit, manage, and retain the entrepreneurial employees your business needs to succeed in the networked age.

You’ll learn:

  • The most important recruiting strategy that innovative companies use to attract their best employees.
  • How to rebuild trust and loyalty with your employees even though you can’t guarantee lifetime employment.
  • How to manage employees who seek constant career growth by defining unique “tours of duty.”
  • Why it pays to empower your employees to build their personal brands and expand their professional networks on LinkedIn and Twitter.
  • How to develop an employee value proposition that resonates with millennials.

Through keynotes and interactive workshops, this is the management and business framework that will help your company generate Silicon Valley-style innovation, delivered by one of the field’s most engaging speakers.

2. The Start-Up of You: Transform Your Work and Career with Entrepreneurial Thinking. 

The career escalator is jammed at every level.

The pandemic has re-shaped the world of work.

Creative disruption is shaking every industry.

Global competition for jobs is fierce.

The employer-employee pact is over and traditional job security is a thing of the past.
In a keynote based on his #1 New York Times bestselling book (a brand new edition of which is being published in May, 2022), Ben presents a blueprint for how to thrive in this new economic landscape.

The key: learn to think and act like an entrepreneur.

In other words, move up that jammed escalator by running your career like it’s a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you.

You don’t need to start your own business, but you do need to adopt the mindset and learn the skill set of entrepreneurs.

Why? Start-ups – and the entrepreneurs who run them – are nimble. They invest in themselves.

They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead in today’s fractured world of work.

In this keynote, you will learn the Silicon Valley strategies that will make you more effective at your current job and jump-start your career for the long term.
This is a bold presentation on thriving in a world where every professional must be the entrepreneur of his or her own life.

3. Millennials at Work: Crossing the Generational Divide.

Today, four generations are in the same workplace at the same time. This is unprecedented. And it introduces a host of challenges and opportunities. You can’t manage millennials the way you were managed. To bring out the best of your millennial employees, and to create a corporate culture where all generations can effectively work with each other, you need to rethink every aspect of how you recruit, manage, and retain employees.

Ben’s background makes him uniquely qualified to deliver this entertaining keynote: as “one of America’s top young entrepreneurs” according to BusinessWeek he speaks credibly on his own generational dynamics while also drawing upon his leading corporate experience.