Building Without Permission: Democratizing Entrepreneurship

Event ID: PP1149692

Fri, Mar 13, 2026 | TBD

Venue: TBD Venue

View on Official SXSW

Summary

For decades, company building required permission from institutional gatekeepers. If you didn't go to the right school or know the right people, you were locked out. AI is changing that. Just like bedroom producers no longer need record labels, solo founders no longer need MBAs or VC connections to build businesses. But access to tools isn't enough. Most still fail, not because they can't build, but because they don't know how to navigate uncertainty. This panel explores what infrastructure needs to exist for entrepreneurship to truly be accessible to everyone, and what happens when it is.

Contributors

Raw Event JSON

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      "name": "Oana Ruxandra",
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      "details": "Oana built the infrastructure that transformed the music industry. Now she is doing it again.\r\rRecognized by Billboard and Variety among media’s most powerful business leaders, Oana has spent 20 years turning massive technological disruptions into scalable business victories. At BlackRock, she drove a $15B increase in assets under management on a $64B book. At Warner Music Group as Chief Digital Officer, she led a 200-person global team that increased digital revenue by $2B while negotiating first-of-their-kind deals with Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, and Meta.\r\rOana specializes in recognizing patterns across industry transformations and building the systems that scale success during explosive growth periods.\r\rPATTERN RECOGNITION MEETS PLATFORM EXECUTION\r\rThe music industry’s transformation was not accidental. It required deliberate infrastructure building. While others saw chaos, Oana saw patterns. AI democratized building, millions of new musicians emerged, and existing success systems collapsed. Oana built the frameworks that scaled winners during music’s explosive growth.\r\rTHE NEXT TRANSFORMATION IS ALREADY HERE\r\rToday’s entrepreneurship explosion mirrors music’s 2015 inflection point. 200M startups globally, 137K daily launches, and the same broken success systems that existed before AI democratized building. Oana’s combination of pattern recognition (Wharton MBA, BlackRock quantitative background), transformation execution (11 years building music’s AI infrastructure), and builder empathy (evaluating every major music and technology company globally) positions her to solve entrepreneurship’s infrastructure gap.\r\rOana is not here to inspire a few unicorns. She is here to launch a generation of builders who win.",
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