Introducing the Cerebral Valley AI Summit

An invite-only artificial intelligence summit on March 30 in Hayes Valley

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m hosting an invite-only artificial intelligence summit in Hayes Valley on Thursday, March 30, with my friends at Volley.

• The one-day event will feature the CEOs of Stability AI, Runway, Adept, and Quora, along with the president of Jasper.

• John Curtius, who left Tiger Global to found his new fund Cedar, will be speaking publicly for the first time since his departure.

• Deep Nishar, the former senior SoftBank Vision Fund investor-turned lead growth investor for General Catalyst, will sit down with me.

• Investors from Benchmark, Bloomberg Beta, Coatue, Founders Fund, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, and Sequoia are scheduled to participate.

• We’ll have two panels of early-stage YC company founders speaking about their new companies.

• You can see the speaker list on our website.

We’re now accepting applications to this 200-person event. You can apply here.

Spots are extremely limited but we will do our best to give preference to paid Newcomer subscribers. Tickets cost $599.

While most Newcomer subscribers won’t be able to attend in person, we’re going to publish videos, podcast episodes, and posts from the conference. So it should be a content bonanza for newsletter subscribers.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the event and our coverage of it, reach out.

I’m hosting the event with voice AI gaming company Volley. You might remember them from the podcast episode about the state of consumer investing. Putting on an event with your friends definitely makes event organizing go more smoothly.

This is Newcomer’s first all-day event.¹ It’s a big milestone for a 2-year-old Substack that’s just me and my chief of staff, Riley Konsella.

Generative artificial intelligence is the first hype cycle that I’ve lived through in Silicon Valley that I’ve really believed in. Self-driving cars and crypto felt absurd. The shift to mobile had already happened before I started covering tech. On-demand and marketplaces have been less disruptive than many declared that they would be. But generative artificial intelligence companies are showing us the results of their work as they’re developing — and regular people get it.

The pace of improvement is stunning. And unlike something like self-driving cars, these technologies don’t need to be perfect in order to be useful.

This isn’t business model innovation — it’s technological.

So I’m using my independence to put on an industry event while deals are getting done and excitement is red hot. I’m so excited to put the top AI company CEOs together with investors and early-stage founders in Hayes Valley, and then relay what they have to say to my readers around the world.

Apply for a ticket or subscribe to follow along.

1. Real Newcomer heads will remember that I hosted VC Jeopardy last year with Volley at SXSW.