📺 Conference talks will be posted over next few weeks on our YouTube

Born Different: How AI Natives Build Startups

The playbook for building a startup hasn't changed much in 20 years - until now. Fewer people, different skills, and a completely different sense of what's possible. A new generation of founders is shipping products with smaller teams, moving faster, and using AI across every function. Join a group of AI-native founders for a candid look at how they're actually using AI inside their own companies - in their workflows, their code, their ops - and what the shape of their teams looks like as a result. 

Nikhil Benesch

CTO

Nikhil Benesch

turbopuffer

Nikhil Benesch has spent over a decade working on database systems. He was an early engineer at Cockroach Labs, focused on distributed SQL, and went on to serve as CTO of Materialize, where he led development of a streaming database built on incremental computation. He is an active open-source contributor, with projects spanning SQL tooling, systems programming in Rust, and developer utilities. Nikhil is now CTO of turbopuffer, a serverless search engine built on object storage and used by products like Anthropic, Cursor, and Notion.

Alex Mashrabov

Co-founder & CEO

Alex Mashrabov

Higgsfield

Alex Mashrabov is the founder and CEO of Higgsfield AI, a generative video company building AI-powered tools for creating high-quality social and marketing content. He previously led generative AI at Snap and co-founded AI Factory, which was acquired by Snap, and he’s known for helping bring advanced computer vision and consumer AI products to scale.

Silas Alberti

Founding Team

Silas Alberti

Cognition

Silas Alberti is a Stanford-trained AI researcher and founding team member at Cognition, where he leads research on the company’s AI coding products. Before joining Cognition, he worked at Google DeepMind, Jane Street, and on his own startups.

Brie Wolfson

CMO & Storyteller

Brie Wolfson

Positive Sum / Colossus

Brie Wolfson is a marketer, writer, storyteller, and curator who has led marketing and culture work at companies including Stripe, Figma, Cursor, Positive Sum, and Colossus. She’s known for her taste-driven approach to storytelling and for helping craft companies build strong internal culture and public narrative.

Read her latest:
🔗 Inside Notion [Colossus]
🔗 Inside Cursor [Colossus]