A moderated panel on markets before they had a name
Roys · Moderator
Beckman · LEAP
Lauer · Adom“There's no market for that.”
Five self-defeating words.
Five little words no founder wants to hear, and one of the most short-sighted clichés in business. Because someone, somewhere, is jumping on a hidden opportunity and quietly building a market for it.
Every category-defining company starts the same way. Some founder notices the one thing nobody else has clocked yet.
And here's the part nobody tells you. That discovery might be worth millions. Sometimes billions. Sitting right there. In a market everyone else walked past.
Four founders share the decisions behind their discoveries. This is a working session. Pattern recognition, live, in front of you. The exact kind you need to be running in your own industry starting Monday.
We're going to get into how these four people read weak signals before anyone else did, and what almost made them miss it. Million-dollar near-miss for some. Billion-dollar near-miss for one of them.
Then they'll tell you what they're watching for next.
You leave with a sharper eye and an actual framework so you can find your own hidden market before somebody else slaps their name on it first.
Finding the billion-dollar opportunity everyone else missed.
Built MotionSafe long before regulators mandated it or Wall Street priced it in. He saw 280 million connected vehicles generating sensitive, unprotected personal data with no plan to shield it. He recognized a market hiding in plain sight, a pattern he's monetized across multiple funded ventures.
Leads LEAP, the Colorado space company that treats orbit as a delivery route. LEAP's reusable Bullfrog vehicle flew in May 2026, the first integrated test of its end-to-end space logistics system.
Keri Waters is an MIT-trained engineer and serial hardware founder. She built Buoy Labs as a water conservation tool for homeowners and discovered the real buyer was the insurance industry. After Resideo acquired Buoy in 2019, she ran its $320 million water business. Today she leads Deep Tech Commercialization at Capital Factory and runs Petrichor Labs in Austin. Her book More Energy, Clean Planet arrives from Forbes Books in January 2027.
Built Simplewire, one of the first business text-messaging platforms, when SMS was still a novelty, then built Zipwhip and sold it in a $1 billion deal. Now he's building Adom in Fort Worth, Texas, the world's first AI electronics prototyping cloud lab, where AI designs real circuit boards and an on-site fab delivers finished boards in four hours. While the world stares at the $600 billion chip market, he's betting on the roughly $85 billion printed circuit board market hiding right under it, and on American-made electronics before the rest catches on.
Space, water, mobility data, and messaging share a pattern. Each founder read the same kind of early signal.
Each founder built the wrong version of the company at least once. What they changed, and when, is the real lesson.
The panel closes by turning the lens on the audience's own industries. What's the signal nobody in the room has priced in yet?
All four founders are actively building. The audience gets live pattern recognition from people still in the middle of it.