What's New at Cerebral Valley This Year
Plus, Marissa Mayer joins as a speaker for Cerebral Valley. There's still time to apply though spots are limited.
We’re about five weeks away from our Cerebral Valley AI Summit, which will be on Wednesday, November 20, in San Francisco.
We’re doing a lot to make Cerebral Valley even better this year besides attracting great speakers.
We’re adding two new elements to the Cerebral Valley AI Summit this year. We’ll have small group discussions, led by top leaders in artificial intelligence, and on-stage demonstrations of novel AI products. That means you’ll get a chance to mix it up with your fellow attendees and share your perspective. And then you’ll see what people are working on at the cutting edge. Of course, you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to mingle with your fellow attendees, often one of the most valuable pieces of the event.
If you attended last year, or you’ve heard good things, now’s the time to come back. We’re leaning into the authenticity and intimacy of our first event.
It’s been a year since we’ve brought Cerebral Valley to the Bay Area and we’re so excited to have three of the top startup leaders on stage at the same event — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Scale CEO Alexandr Wang, and Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi.
We’re thrilled to announce that Marissa Mayer will be joining them as a speaker at the summit, along with Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash, Glean CEO Arvind Jain, CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator, and Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado.
Over the last year and a half we’ve built a core group of partners that have sponsored the summit consistently. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, HP, Lambda, Samsung Next, Amazon Alexa Fund, Mayfield, and Obvious Ventures are returning after sponsoring Cerebral Valley last November. Sapphire Ventures and Latham & Watkins have developed into key partners this year. And for this event, we are happy to add Kleiner Perkins, Crusoe, Alkeon Capital, and Pear VC, who are sponsoring for the first time. Thanks to all of them for helping make the Cerebral Valley AI Summit happen.
Spots are running thin for Cerebral Valley, but you can still apply to attend here. (If you’re an early stage startup founder that thinks you should be there and you haven’t announced a substantial funding round, you might consider having your investor email us to make sure we note your application.)
We also have room for a few last-minute sponsors. You can email riley@newcomer.co for more information.
Discussion Groups
Picking up from a successful experiment in New York, we’re introducing discussion groups to our anchor event in San Francisco. Our small groups are a great way to meet your fellow attendees and share your point of view on a topic important to you.
During the invite-only, one-day event we break out into discussion groups led by some of the top figures in the startup AI ecosystem.
We’re bringing this idea to SF, with founders and investors leading discussions on their favorite AI topics.
Discussion Leaders
Barry McCardel, Hex CEO
Jeff Huber, Chroma CEO
Navin Chaddha, Mayfield managing partner
Erica Brescia, Redpoint managing director
Michelle Zhou, Juji CEO
David Lee, Head of Samsung Next
Gabe Stengel, Rogo CEO
Arash Afrakhteh, partner at Pear VC
Kahini Shah, partner at Obvious Ventures
George Fraser, Fivetran CEO
Emergent Behavior
To keep things fresh, this year we’re going to be adding product demonstrations that we’re calling “Emergent Behavior” on stage at Cerebral Valley. We’re accepting submissions now so if you’re an AI founder, you can throw your hat in the ring here. This is a great opportunity to showcase what you’re working on to the people who will appreciate it most.
We are looking for cutting edge, fresh product features that show off cutting edge AI applications or innovative approaches to infrastructure.
Special consideration will be given to products that will be revealed for the first time at Cerebral Valley.
Top reporters from CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and many more are expected to be in the audience. We’ll be publishing video from the talks in this newsletter and on our YouTube page.
More information and the submission form to present your demo on-stage are here.
I wanted to talk about how we got here.
The Cerebral Valley AI Summit started on a lark. I’d never hosted a conference in my life. I was headed to my bachelor party in California. My friends Max Child and James Wilsterman had an empty office on Thursdays when their employees worked from home. Why not try to see what we could pull off in six weeks before we headed to my guys weekend?
We started texting investors and startup founders. Before we knew it, we had the most legit startup AI conference in the Valley at Volley’s offices in Hayes Valley. We stumbled into something organic and wonderful. The controversial Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque divided the audience as to whether he was the next AI messiah or a huckster. We had our famous deal. A major investor deployed $1 billion plus on public AI stocks like Nvidia after he came to our event. The summit took place in an open office and I remember shushing some very wealthy people.
So much was going on in AI that five months later we had our second Cerebral Valley AI Summit in a year. This time, we were more grown up. We held it in a jazz theater. Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla, and Mustafa Suleyman opined on the big questions swirling around the future of artificial intelligence.
This summer, we brought the summit to New York for the first time. We heard from Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti.
Each summit has improved on the last.
While we talk a lot in the newsletter about who is on stage, much of what’s made Cerebral Valley so amazing is who just buys a ticket, sits in the crowd, and mingles at cocktail hour. We have had CEOs of public companies, past speakers, top general partners at venture funds, startup CEOs who went on to raise hundreds of millions, and startup CEOs who had already raised many millions. If you’re an AI startup founder, we want you at Cerebral Valley. You can still apply though spots are limited.
If you have a chip on your shoulder that you should be on stage, you’re exactly who we expect to attend. The best way to get on stage is to come sit in the audience first. Who knows who you’ll meet? It is a very efficient way to meet your competitors, potential partners, and investors in the same day.
We’re so excited to keep leveling up Cerebral Valley. We think the discussion groups and product demonstration will be fun new additions to the summit. We’re glad we took a breather and waited a year before coming back to San Francisco. There’s a lot to talk about.
Hope to see you there.