Founders spend countless hours refining products, raising capital, and pursuing growth, yet many overlook one of the most critical drivers of success: understanding themselves.

Join Erin Liman, strategic advisor, executive coach, and entrepreneurship educator, for an interactive conversation on how self-awareness can become a founder's competitive advantage. Drawing on her experience helping leaders navigate ambiguity, build effective teams, and create lasting impact, Erin will explore how founders can identify their unique strengths, recognize their blind spots, and find complementary partners who help transform vision into reality. 

Whether you're launching your first venture, searching for a co-founder, or building an early-stage team, this session will provide practical tools to help you focus your energy where you create the most value, strengthen collaboration, and avoid the burnout that often comes from trying to do it all alone.

Key Takeaways:

• Identify your unique strengths as a founder and where you create the greatest impact
• Recognize common founder blind spots and leadership gaps
• Understand what to look for in co-founders, collaborators, and early team members
• Learn how complementary partnerships accelerate growth and decision-making
• Develop strategies for avoiding founder burnout through intentional role design
• Build a team that amplifies strengths rather than duplicates them

This session is ideal for: Entrepreneurs, startup founders, innovators, students interested in entrepreneurship, accelerator participants, and anyone seeking to build stronger teams and more sustainable ventures.

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Erin Liman, MBA ’94, FRSA
Strategic Advisor | Human-Centered Innovation & Entrepreneurial Leadership

Erin Liman helps founders and leaders answer a question that can save years of effort: Are we solving the right problem? For more than 30 years, she has helped teams discover what people really need and test ideas before scaling.

She helps founders validate the problem, the payers, the solution, and the people it serves, while also helping them grow as leaders and builders of high-performing teams. A validated idea can still fail when a team can’t coordinate, adapt, or keep learning. Erin helps founders recognize their strengths, find complementary partners, build trust, and learn to work well together as the venture grows. Founders and leaders tend to call her when seeking more clarity and momentum.

Erin led innovation work at SAP, Autodesk, and Intuit, and has advised Fortune 500 companies, startups, and mission-driven organizations in pharma, medical devices, fitness and wellness, technology, and other industries. She coached founders and teams at Stanford through the d.school and the Department of Mechanical Engineering and taught at the Hasso Plattner Institut in Germany. At Babson, she serves as a WIN Lab Mastermind Advisor.

Today her focus is health innovation, longevity, and intergenerational care. She connects entrepreneurs, care providers, and communities across sectors to design better ways to age, work, and care for one another, with autonomy, connection, and dignity at the center.

Erin holds an MBA from Babson College and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Strategic Doing Institute.