We’re hosting our second INSIDER evening of the year on May 16th, a Thursday night, at the beautiful 46th floor of Salesforce Tower, thanks to the generosity of CBRE, the commercial real estate services and investment firm.
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Featuring special guest Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI — whose goal is to prevent artificial intelligence from doing harm — and the chairman of Y Combinator, where he stepped down as president earlier this year after a five-year run. We’ll talk about why he made the move, and what his priorities are going forward.
Also featuring Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of Boom, whose electrifying — and also completely audacious — ambition it is to build a supersonic passenger plane that flies at twice the speed of sound — and charges business class fares. Investors have already given the young company $141 million to get cracking. During this sit-down we’ll get answers about its technology, its timeline, its potential impact on the environment and much, much more.
Last but not least, we’re thrilled to be welcoming one of the world’s most famous AI researchers, Daphne Koller, a longtime Stanford professor who cofounded the online education company Coursera; logged time as the chief computing officer of Calico, Google’s life-extension spinoff; and earlier this month, took the wraps off her newest startup, Insitro, a drug development company that has quietly raised $100 million in Series A funding, including from Andreessen Horowitz and Jeff Bezos. Why is the healthcare world buzzing about it? We’ll find out.
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Giant thanks to our partners in the evening: JetBlue Ventures, the Silicon Valley-based venture outfit that invests in and partners with early-stage startups at the intersection of technology and travel
and
Affinity, the relationship intelligence platform that helps teams manage and grow their networks by unlocking introductions to decision makers and auto-populating pipelines to increase deal flow.
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As always, you can also expect great food and drinks and networking. We’re excited!
For those who haven’t experienced our events yet, we think of them like cocktail parties with great content. Past entrepreneurs who have appeared include Juul founders Adam Bowen and James Monsees, Vlad Tenev (Robinhood), Emily Weiss (Glossier), Patrick Brown (Impossible Foods), Julie Wainwright (The RealReal), Marten Mickos (HackerOne), Tina Sharkey (Brandless), Howie Liu (Airtable), Amy Chang (Accompany), Matt Mullenweg (Automattic), Peter Szulczeski (Wish), Kim Scott (Radical Candor), David Rogier (MasterClass), Mark Gainey (Strava), Ryan Williams (Cadre), Carl Bass (Autodesk), Zander Lurie (SurveyMonkey), and Vivek Ramaswamy (Riovant Sciences), among many others.
We’ve also featured lots of intriguing VCs, including Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), Chamath Palihapitiya (Social Capital), Ravi Mhatre (Lightspeed Venture Partners), Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Steve Jurvetson (Future Ventures), Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Bill Maris (formerly of Google Ventures), Craig Hanson (NextWorld Capital), Megan Quinn (Spark Capital), Keith Rabois (Khosla Ventures), Hunter Walk (Homebrew), Heidi Roizen (DFJ), Bradley Tusk (Tusk Ventures), Naval Ravikant (AngelList), Hans Tung (GGV Capital), Tony Conrad (True Ventures), Greg Gretsch (Jackson Square Ventures), Caterina Fake (Yes VC), Dan Morehead (Pantera Capital), Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures), Semil Shah (Haystack) and Jeffrey Housenbold and Anna Lo of the SoftBank Vision Fund.
We appreciate each of them for making the time for us.