05/25/2023
Enterprise
Introducing Generative SF — An In-Person Meetup
Meet the founders of Tome and LangChain, and AI investors and entrepreneurs, at Lightspeed’s SF office
In 1975, a group of hippies with thick glasses congregated in a garage in Menlo Park, CA. With piles of electronics, hackers from across the Bay were engaging in incredibly productive pursuits like homemade knockoffs of popular arcade games and faking telephone control codes to make (illegal) free cross-country telephone calls. This was the beginning of Homebrew Computer Club, an informal group of computer hobbyists who gathered to trade notes about personal computing devices.
There was little to no indication that this motley collection of misfits would end up spawning the entire personal computing industry and found behemoth companies that would accrue trillions of dollars in enterprise value. The club fostered meaningful conversation and connections over monthly meetings and has been described as “the crucible for an entire industry” of personal computing.
There’s a common saying in venture that the next big thing will look like a toy. This has been true for time immemorial — from Chinese New Year fireworks (gunpowder) to modern military ammunition, from the Wright Flyer to commercial jumbo jets.
The feeling in the air right now is that this is going to be true for generative models — we at Lightspeed believe the next technology wave will be defined by making software smarter through the underpinning of AI. So we’re bringing together the misfits, the rebels, and the troublemakers, to see through a technological shift that may make the entire personal computing industry look like child’s play.
Today we’re launching Generative SF — a community for builders in the Bay Area AI community to come together, learn from industry leaders and each another, and share the exciting new products they are building.
We are kicking off our inaugural meetup June 14th at our Lightspeed San Francisco office, joined by speakers Elad Gil (Investor and Entrepreneur), Henri Liriani (Co-founder, Tome), and Harrison Chase (CEO, Langchain). Lisa Han, a Partner at Lightspeed, will be moderating.
If you’d like to attend, sign up here. Also, if you’re part of a local team that’s interested in demoing your product, please fill out this form.
Elad Gil is an entrepreneur and investor to private companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe and Wish. He is co-founder and chairman at Color Genomics and its former CEO. Previously, Gil was VP of corporate strategy at Twitter after it acquired his firm Mixer Labs, and he was Google’s original product manager for Google Mobile Maps.
Henri Liriani is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Tome, a Generative AI storytelling platform that was the fastest productivity software maker to reach 1 million users. He previously led product at Instagram and Messenger and was a product design manager at Facebook.
Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, a company formed around the open-source Python/Typescript packages that aim to make it easy to develop Language Model applications. Prior to starting LangChain, he led the ML team at Robust Intelligence (an MLOps company focused on testing and validation of machine learning models), led the entity linking team at Kensho (a fintech startup), and studied stats and CS at Harvard.
As we embrace a new era of AI-driven innovation, Generative SF aims to be a center of gravity for the local AI community. Through informative talks from local experts, product demos, and networking, we aspire to create a thriving environment where builders of AI products can collaborate and inspire one another. Whether you’re building a product that’s already found product market fit or hacking away on your first prototype, please join us at the inaugural Generative SF meetup on June 14th.
If you have more questions about Generative SF, or just want to get in touch, email Lisa Han, or find her on Twitter.
