Mike Krieger, a former CPO at Anthropic, details his transition to an IC role to build directly with AI, advocating for "unreasonable" asks like porting entire codebases. He shares lessons from Instagram on scaling and highlights Anthropic's internal use of Claude as a proactive teammate, flexible lab structure, and critical insights on AI product design, vertical applications, and mental health in the fast-paced AI industry.
Steve Mock, investor and entrepreneur, discusses aisavedme.org, a platform born from his father's question, "How does one use AI?". The site gathers real-world stories of AI's positive impact, revealing surprising human outcomes in healthcare, education, and personal fulfillment, often less about technology and more about connection. He also shares his unique no-code journey in building the site and his venture capital insights into the "data flywheel" and "vertical AI" as key to successful investments.
Chris Lovejoy argues that winning in vertical AI is an organizational challenge, not just a technical one. He introduces a framework of three roles for domain experts—Oracle, Evaluator, and Architect—to effectively embed their knowledge into AI products, illustrated with case studies from companies like Granola and Anterior.
Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of Legora, argues that as AI agents tackle more complex work, the bottleneck shifts from task execution to planning and review. He proposes a framework for human-agent collaboration based on increasing 'trust' and 'control', and advocates for moving beyond simple chat interfaces to high-bandwidth, domain-specific artifacts like documents and structured reviews for more effective collaboration.
Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan of Crosby discuss their innovative approach of building an AI-first law firm instead of a traditional legal software company. They detail how integrating lawyers and AI engineers creates a unique feedback loop for automating contract negotiations, moving from billable hours to per-document pricing to achieve deal velocity, and their vision for AI agents that can simulate entire negotiations.
Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora, shares insights on building a successful vertical AI company for the legal industry. He discusses their product strategy, the technical stack designed for a multi-model future, the go-to-market motion for conservative industries, and the challenges of scaling from 10 to 100 people in 13 months.