Beyond the Buzz: How One Founder Redefined Value at NY Tech Week

NEW YORK, NY – June 18, 2026 – Amid the controlled chaos of New York Tech Week, where the currency is often a blend of caffeine, QR codes, and fleeting connections, a distinct signal emerged from a private rooftop. While thousands of entrepreneurs, investors, and operators navigated a sea of panels and mixers, one Ukrainian-born ecosystem builder, Eleonora Berylo, posed a fundamental question: What if an event was designed not for noise, but for utility?

The result was "App Founders Island: Roundtables, Drinks & Tarot," a gathering that deliberately eschewed the week's typical frenzy. Instead of a cavernous hall, it was an intimate rooftop. Instead of a succession of speakers, it was a series of structured conversations. The event, curated by Berylo’s firm ELAR Group, was an experiment in value creation, stripping away the performative aspects of networking to focus on the commercial realities facing consumer app founders today.

A Deliberately Different Room

The standard Tech Week playbook is well-worn: a high-profile panel followed by a sprawling mixer where founders vie for the attention of investors. Berylo, a B2B growth strategist with over seven years of experience in software commercialization, saw a gap. “New York Tech Week can get very loud, and many events start to feel the same,” she said in a statement. “I wanted to create a room that felt useful for consumer app founders.”

Usefulness, in this context, meant a radical departure from the norm. The event replaced the passive panel format with interactive roundtables, a mini Shark Tank-style feedback session for founders to pitch and refine their ideas, and dedicated investor touchpoints. The structure was engineered to foster substantive dialogue on the topics that keep founders up at night: monetization, user retention, capital access, and distribution.

The guest list was as curated as the format. In the room were founders and operators from some of the most compelling names in the consumer app space. This included WeWard, the walking rewards app that has successfully scaled to over 20 million users, and Da Vinci Eye, an AR drawing tool recognized by Fast Company for its innovative design. Adventure travel planner Fyno was also represented, alongside key players from the investment community, payments partners, and even AI ecosystem leaders from ByteDance. This wasn't a room for beginners; it was a peer group of builders actively navigating the challenges of growth and scale.

The intention was clear: to create an environment where a founder could get direct feedback on their monetization model from a VC, discuss payment infrastructure with a partner, and learn retention strategies from an operator who had already scaled to millions of users—all in one evening.

The Commercial Imperative

At the heart of App Founders Island was a philosophy Berylo champions in her work: the commercial imperative. “Consumer technology is cultural, but it is also commercial,” she stated. This perspective shifts the focus from simply building a beloved product to building a sustainable business around it.

This theme is particularly resonant in the current venture climate, where the mantra has shifted from "growth at all costs" to "path to profitability." Investors are no longer just looking for user numbers; they are scrutinizing business models, retention cohorts, and revenue infrastructure. The topics on the agenda at Berylo’s event—monetization, retention, capital, and distribution—are the four pillars of this new commercial reality.

Berylo’s own career, which began in international sales for a B2B manufacturing company in Ukraine before she pivoted to tech in North America, has been defined by a focus on Go-to-Market (GTM) execution. Her firm, ELAR Group, specializes in software commercialization, cloud marketplace strategy, and what she terms "AI-enabled revenue infrastructure." This isn't just jargon; it’s the modern toolkit for growth. It involves using artificial intelligence to optimize everything from lead generation and pricing to customer retention, creating a more efficient and effective commercial engine.

By bringing together founders with payments partners and AI leaders from firms like ByteDance, the event provided a practical forum to explore these advanced commercial strategies. The conversations moved beyond the abstract and into the operational: how to leverage new payment rails, how to integrate AI to personalize user experiences for better retention, and how to position a company to attract capital in a discerning market.

New York's Global Tech Tapestry

The event also served as a microcosm of a larger, transformative trend in New York's startup ecosystem: its growing internationalization. Berylo, who navigated the U.S. immigration system while building her career in tech, is part of a powerful wave of Eastern European talent enriching the city’s tech scene.

The gathering reflected this global dynamic. “For me, it was one of the most diverse and genuinely warm rooms I experienced during Tech Week,” Berylo shared. “There were Eastern European founders and VCs, U.S. consumer app operators, angels, payments partners, and people building across mobile, AI, wellness, travel, social, education, and creator tools.”

This diversity is more than a social nicety; it's a strategic advantage. Eastern European countries, known for their strong STEM education programs, have become a powerhouse for technical talent. When these highly skilled founders and engineers bring their ventures to a global hub like New York, they introduce new perspectives, a relentless work ethic, and often, highly efficient and technically robust solutions. The cross-pollination of ideas between local and international founders, as facilitated at App Founders Island, creates a more resilient and innovative ecosystem for everyone.

Berylo’s description of the room as a place "where people could actually help each other" speaks to the community-building aspect that is often a hallmark of diaspora-led initiatives. In a sprawling and often anonymous tech scene, creating these pockets of trust and mutual support is invaluable, particularly for other founders who may be navigating the dual challenges of building a company and adapting to a new country.

Beyond Product-Market Fit

For years, the holy grail for any startup was achieving "product-market fit." But as the industry matures, it's becoming clear that a great product is merely the ticket to entry. The real challenge is building a commercial system around that product—a system that can acquire, retain, and monetize users sustainably.

Eleonora Berylo's App Founders Island was more than just a well-timed event; it was a manifestation of this new paradigm. It was a recognition that a founder's most pressing questions are often not about code, but about commerce. The event’s success highlights a hunger within the startup community for practical, no-nonsense dialogue about the business of technology.

By focusing on what happens after users show up, Berylo and ELAR Group are helping to shift the conversation. It’s a move away from the mythology of the lone genius and their singular product, and toward a more realistic and ultimately more useful understanding of success. It's about understanding monetization levers, retention loops, capital structures, and distribution channels from day one. In the noisy, crowded, and ever-shifting landscape of modern technology, building a room where those conversations can happen is not just useful—it's essential.