Entrepreneurship and Access in Focus: Highlights From Axios Live Discussions

Axios Live is the Promise-based HTTP client’s biggest event of the year, which features talks, discussions, and demonstrations on web topics that clients use to extend their knowledge.

2025 was a huge year for Axios Live due to its top-tier generative-AI-focused lineup, featuring enterprise leaders like Bank of America’s Michelle Boston and Atlassian’s Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir. These influential speakers discussed AI adoption, ethics, automation, and governance, which are all critical topics shaping business and policy in the 2025 AI era.

This article focuses on some of these critical topics and what leaders can learn from them to positively impact their organizations.

The Role of Education in Expanding Entrepreneurial Opportunity

One of the broader but most mentioned topics in Axios Live this year was the pivotal role of education in how it expands entrepreneurial opportunity.

Many of the talks mentioned or began their talk with the fact that education is a foundation stone for startups, as it helps them become ready for the rocky road ahead and learn the skills to constantly innovate and adapt to market changes.

Traditional academic pathways were mentioned as making way for skills-based learning, which allows founders to focus on what they need to know to expand their business and what their employees need to know, instead of learning programs that may focus on pre-defined, outdated topics. This approach has the advantage of bridging the gap between education systems and real-world entrepreneurship.

The way that the talks this year explored education helped prepare future founders for the economic uncertainty of the future by practicing a flexible needs-only approach to learning.

Access to Capital, Networks, and Resources

Many barriers were explored, spoken about, and broken this year. Several underrepresented founders took to the stage to offer their insights and business opportunities, showing that business is open to founders from every gender, race, and background, and the path to success is open to all.

Another big topic that broke barriers was the vital significance of mentorship as a benefit of investors coming on board with startups, as well as accelerators and community programs in promoting and supporting startups.

One of the most popular and stimulating topics that caught the audience’s entrepreneurial attention was the public and private efforts to widen access to startup founding. This topic encouraged many entrepreneurs to go forward with their ideas and inspired them to begin their journey to founding their first startup, despite the barriers they might face.

The long-term impact of inclusive funding ecosystems is likely to be higher levels of innovation and new perspectives from a broader range of voices in diverse marketplaces.

Entrepreneurship Amid Economic Change

Economic change was also an impossible-to-avoid topic at Axios Live 2025. The way that shifting economic conditions, such as global conflicts and radical changes in US governmental power, took centre-stage as drivers for agile startup founder skills.

One of the aspects that was discussed was how investment opportunities can suffer severe negative effects from economic uncertainty caused by the Russia-Ukraine war and the Trump administration.

The main point was that radical changes in attitudes toward funding and certain markets in key nations like the USA can reduce investor opportunities and increase competition for investment, making it far more challenging for founders to continue their business throughout Stage A, Stage B, and Stage C funding rounds.

Technology was mentioned several times, with generative AI a key technology for lowering entry barriers and helping startups compete on a more even playing field with established enterprises.

Cybersecurity Considerations for Emerging Entrepreneurs

A less spoken-about but equally crucial topic for entrepreneurs was cybersecurity.

The need-to-know facts on the rising cybersecurity risks that all early-stage companies face but few tackle head-on due to budgetary constraints emerged several times throughout many talks as an often overlooked consideration, but one that is critical to success.

One of the most effective ways to reduce these risks is to evaluate any new partners that founders are considering working with for their cybersecurity risks. Vendor risk assessment was a popular tool around this topic as a means of reducing this risk by assessing the risk of third-party threats from each vendor to balance growth, compliance, and data protection regulations.

Conclusion: Building a More Inclusive Entrepreneurial Future

The Axios Live 2025 event was packed with topics that entrepreneurs need to succeed.

The biggest overarching topic that all other topics fed back into was how to align education, reduce barriers to access, and how to face up to and adapt to economic uncertainties.

Another frequent topic was how to share responsibility across different institutions, a diverse portfolio of investors, and supportive communities to succeed on the journey from Seed to IPO.

Axios Live turned a wide array of discussions this year into measurable, long-term actions to help entrepreneurs succeed despite any challenge they might face.