The Alliance Shield: How to De-Risk Your Scale-Up Journey

International expansion. Entering a new category. Competing with giants. These are the defining moments of a scale-up's path, but they are also the riskiest—they burn cash and can break a company. We've been taught that capital is how you mitigate risk. But what if our most powerful risk-management tool isn't money, but relationships? Drawing from my experiences—from commercializing holographic technology where a hardware partnership was a condition for survival, to building global operations at ElevenLabs—I argue that strategic alliances are not just a 'growth engine'. They are, first and foremost, a 'shield'. A shield that protects you from the high cost of market entry, the uncertainty of product-market fit, and the brute force of the competition. This talk is a call for founders to stop seeing partnerships as an optional add-on and start treating them as a fundamental part of their strategy for survival and domination.