The AI Founder Playbook, Rewritten - #AIWeekNY #Dinner

Invitation only · 15 seats · Approval required For leaders of Series A+ startups building proprietary AI models, with a select number of seats reserved for investors. This is a roundtable, not a panel: everyone at the table is welcome to bring opinions. Some of the investors in the room: Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (GHI Fund) Presidio Ventures (Sumitomo Corporation) Morgan Stanley Ventures Lab Description: When AI compresses engineering cycles from months to days, the scarcest thing in a startup is no longer the ability to build. It's knowing what to build, for whom, and how to win when everyone can ship. That shift rewrites the founder's job. Moats move from code to data, distribution, and judgment. Team shapes change. Capital efficiency changes what "venture scale" even means. The playbooks most of us learned are quietly going out of date, and the new ones are being written right now, by the people in rooms like this one. The evening: Dinner and conversation with a curated table of ~15 founders, operators, and investors. Exceptional wines, thoughtfully curated cuisine, and original artwork. Guests will experience a thoughtfully curated progression of refined dishes, premium selections, and seasonal ingredients, accompanied by Cava Brut & Rosé, Petit Chablis, and Malbec. The evening concludes with an exclusive dessert pairing and the Signature Cocktail, a bespoke finale to the experience. What we'll get into: What's newly easy, what's suddenly hard, and what that does to the first 18 months of a company Where defensibility actually lives when software is cheap How team composition and hiring change when one builder does the work of five What the next generation of founder playbooks will look like House rules:Off the record. No slides, no pitches, no recording. Come with a point of view. ORGANIZED BY Elpis LabsWe work with the government sector and international trade agencies to help their startups find corporate partners in the U.S. The VerticalAn online publication, community platform, and event series focusing on international venture ecosystem. Trinovation Partners: The "Scale AI" of Venture Backed Startups We are an AI data operations partner for venture-backed teams building computer vision and AI products. We build and run dedicated annotation pods: named, trained teams assigned to your product, not an anonymous crowd. Covering image and video annotation, gold-set calibration, human-in-the-loop QA, and edge-case review. Pods launch in 1–2 weeks, scale with your deployments, and deliver quality you can audit: 500+ annotators deployed, 95%+ QA accuracy, and a 30% model accuracy lift for our clients. Independent and New York–based.