When we launched Work-Bench 11 years ago, you could count every enterprise software company in New York City on one hand. Fast forward to today, and the NYC community has grown in leaps and bounds.

We’re more bullish on the NYC ecosystem than ever before, and nowhere is this more evident than at our Work-Bench NYC Enterprise Operators Retreat.

Last week, we handpicked 150 of NYC’s top SaaS and Infra operators for a full-day retreat, packed with off-the-record conversations, shared insights, and invaluable connections, up at sunny Bear Mountain State Park.

From early-stage startups to late-stage scale-ups, our attendees represented some of the fastest-growing enterprise companies, including Baseten, Merge, MotherDuck, Clay, Retool, Temporal, Pinecone, Linear, Chronosphere, Databricks, and more. Seeing everyone in one room was a powerful testament: the next generation of enterprise leaders in NYC is here and stronger than ever.

Having been at the center of this growth from the beginning, we at Work-Bench know that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that’s why we continue our tireless mission to grow the NYC enterprise community.

As the go-to enterprise Seed VC firm in NYC, we love connecting with founders and helping operators think through their next move. If you’re an operator, founder, pre-founder in enterprise/SaaS/Infra already working on an idea or think you might get the founder bug one day, reach out if you’d like to chat about all things B2B/enterprise/infra software.

Our guests got masterclasses in 0 to 1 company building with topics, including:

• 20 Years Of Startup Operating Lessons Learned…The Hard Way with David Politis (Founder, BetterCloud)
• Lessons Learned Scaling AssemblyAI with Dylan Fox (Founder & CEO, AssemblyAI)
• Product & Growth Inflection Points with Nan Yu (Head of Product, Linear) and Jane Kelly (Previous Head of Growth, Retool)
• Does Your Infra Startup Need To Be Open Source? with Taylor Linton (Enterprise Sales & Partnerships, Hugging Face) and Rachel Dines (Head of Product & Solutions Marketing, Chronosphere) 
• Behind the Scenes of Fast-Growth SaaS Sales with Varun Anand (Head of Ops, Clay) and  Robert Williams (Director of Commercial Sales, Merge)
• Pre-Sales: Scoping Your Way To Successful Customer Engagements with Eliot Knudsen (Director of Field Engineering, Databricks)
• Post-Sales: The Most Important Thing You're Not Doing with Seb Zaborowski (Senior Director of Customer Success, Nike) and Will Nowak (VP of Americas, Sales Engineering, Dataiku)
• Technical Sales: Bridging the Gap Between Complexity & Customer with Nitzan Shapira (Co-Founder & CEO, Epsagon) and Zac Smith (Founder, Packet) 
• DevRel: Building a Community From Scratch with Peggy Rayzis (Senior Director Developer Experience, Apollo GraphQL) and Bear Douglas (Director of Developer Relations, Pinecone) 
• Closing Your First 3 Design Partners with Danny Sigurdson (Founder & CEO, Courier Health) and Jake Moshenko (Co-Founder & CEO, AuthZed)

Check out some highlights from the day: 

Check out more learnings, photos, and recaps from attendees at #LFGNYC2024.