Selected stages
A partial list of rooms I've been trusted with.
On stage
A few of the rooms.
The range
From the C-suite to the shop floor.
The boardroom and the break room are closer than anyone admits. I've spent a career translating between them — taking the assumptions buried in a spreadsheet, a deck, a product model and making them land on a job site, then carrying what actually happens on the floor back into the numbers. Same language. Same respect. Nobody gets talked down to.
Polished without being corporate.
Plain without being simple.
Serious without taking myself too seriously.
The practice
I run the company I'm talking about.
Fortune 500 rigor. Main Street reality.
Main Street Operator is my practice. We bring Silicon Valley product discipline to the small and mid-market companies now adopting AI — finding where it actually pays off, building the systems that do the work, and teaching their people to own it.
So when you book me, you're not getting a keynote tourist. You're getting the founder who's building it — with material straight from work we're running with operators right now.
mainstreet-operator.com →What I speak on
Tactical enough to implement on Monday. Strategic enough to change the business.
Systems that scale without breaking what works.
How a service business builds leverage, so it stops depending on the owner for every decision.
Product thinking for Main Street.
What Silicon Valley product teams know — and how any local operator can use it, minus the jargon.
AI for operators, not hyped demos.
Where AI actually earns its keep in a real business, and where it's just expensive noise.
I also moderate — panels, fireside chats, and on-stage interviews.
About
The short version.
Cris Valerio is the founder of Main Street Operator. She started as a financial news journalist at Bloomberg TV, then spent a decade in Silicon Valley: design thinking at IDEO, product and operations at Uber and Instacart, then VP of Product at a venture-backed startup.
She built Main Street Operator to bring that product discipline to small and mid-market companies adopting AI. MSO finds where AI and automation actually pay off, builds the systems that do the work, and teaches their people to own it — so the instinct that built the business becomes infrastructure the whole company can scale on.
Press kit
Everything an organizer needs to announce the session.
