Mike Belsito thought he wanted a career in sports management, but found himself loving starting new things. His first job was working as employee #1 for a startup, and he has never looked back.
Today he is the co-founder of Product Collective. They founded the company in 2014 as a way to help product people all over the world connect, collaborate, and generally be inspired. As product people themselves, they found they were wanting to find places where they could meet other product people. They looked around and were surprised to find a lack of a product community that gathered in one place often, especially outside of Silicon Valley.
And so Product Collective was born.
Product Collective’s first initiative was INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, which initially took place in 2015. In its first year, INDUSTRY attracted 250 attendees from 21 states and 7 countries. Just one year later, attendance nearly doubled ? with attendees from both years represented from larger enterprises and venture backed startups alike, including IBM, Intuit, Oracle, Shopify, GoDaddy, LeadPages, and others.
Today, Product Collective educates and connects product people in many more ways, including through Product Brief (our weekly newsletter) and Product Lunch (our monthly webinar series).
Their mission is to redefine and shape the future of product management, and it’s one that they know they can’t do alone. Mike and his team hope you’ll join Product Collective to be a part of this evolution.
Check out this episode of “Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do” to hear Mike’s journey.