The Infrastructure Bet: Fireside Chat with Amr Awadallah

Join us for a fireside chat with Amr Awadallah, computer scientist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Cloudera and Vectara, as part of Tech Founders SF 2026. This session will explore how founders recognize a technology shift early enough to build around it, especially before the market fully understands what it needs. We’ll discuss what Amr saw in big data before Cloudera became a major enterprise company, how to distinguish a technically exciting idea from a problem customers will actually pay to solve, how much market education is too much, and what founders should understand about building infrastructure for enterprise customers with long sales cycles. The conversation will also look at the transition from big data to generative AI, what has changed for technical founders, where durable value is likely to sit as models become more capable, and how to think about trust, data, infrastructure, and defensibility in enterprise AI. The session is designed for technical founders, enterprise software companies, and anyone building around a major technology shift before the market is fully formed. Hosted by SparkLabs as part of Tech Founders SF 2026, in partnership with CODE, MCIT and UC Berkeley.