Refounding: How to Compete in the AI Era When You Didn't Start There
Most companies didn't start in the AI era. They were built on assumptions that are now being dismantled — about headcount, hiring, how teams grow, and what work even looks like.
Jason Smith, Co-Founder & CEO of Klue, is doing something rare: asking what it would mean to reFound an established company from scratch — and then actually doing it.
Klue is an AI-powered competitive intelligence platform helping product marketers and revenue teams collect, curate, and deliver actionable competitor insights — and Jason has been building it since 2015. But if he were starting today, the company would look fundamentally different. Agent-first. Human-second. Optimized to take AI as far as it can go before defaulting to a new hire.
That's the mindset he's bringing to every part of the business now — and the mindset he believes every pre-GPT company needs to adopt to survive.
In this session, Jason will unpack what "refounding" actually means in practice: shifting culture, rewriting assumptions about roles, and building workflows that let smaller teams move faster — without flinching at the uncomfortable question of what AI might replace.
What we'll get into
Why established companies face a harder AI transition than startups — and how to close the gap
The "agent-first, human-second" operating model: what it looks like, why it's hard, and why it's necessary
How to think about roles that AI is encroaching on — and how to get your team leaning into that change rather than away from it
Where humans still belong (marketing, sales, judgment calls) — and how AI should be augmenting them, not waiting for them
Who it's for Founders, operators, and execs running companies that predate the AI wave — and are figuring out how to compete like they didn't.
Format Conversation + Q&A. Come with your thorniest questions about culture, hiring, and what it means to rebuild a company for the AI era.