AI for Everyone: A Full-Day Bootcamp
We've brought together leading AI workshop instructors—including instructors who have taught at Google and Stanford—for a full day of hands-on learning designed to take you from AI-curious to AI-capable. Come curious leave inspired and empowered.
Through a one-time partnership with nonprofit Funding Breakthrough Lab, AI Founder Playbook, venture studio Byte Cord, and AI Insiders you will get access to top AI workshops at a fraction of what these sessions would normally cost.
No coding experience. No technical background. No sitting through hours of theory.
This bootcamp is built for founders, operators, creatives, community builders, and the simply curious who keep hearing that AI is changing everything—and are ready to actually understand it, use it, and build with it.
In one day, you'll go from learning → building to learning → building.
We'll start with the oldest human technology: story.
Then we'll explore how Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley—and what its history can teach us about the AI revolution happening now.
And then, you'll build.
→ Create a working app without writing code
→ Build your own AI agent
→ Learn practical AI workflows you can use immediately
→ Understand what's actually possible with today's tools
We designed the entire day as one connected arc—ending with perhaps the most important question of all:
What is any of this actually for?
AI is changing who gets to build.
You no longer need to be an engineer to turn an idea into something real.
Come curious. Leave having built something.
And more importantly, leave ready to be an author of what comes next—not a spectator to it.
The Day
9:00 – 10:00 am · What If Productivity Isn’t Agency?
Opening Keynote Speaker
— Nicole Yue
10:00 – 12:00 pm · Vibe Code a Startup in 2 Hours
Build an app & business like a pro using AI
— Alisha Outridge
12:00 – 12:30 pm · Lunch Break
12:30 – 12:55 pm · The History of Silicon Valley — Brett Waters
1:00 – 1:25 pm · The Human Advantage
Why the future of business is a return to knowing your customer — Zornitza Stefanova
1:30 – 3:25 pm · Building Agents: Put AI to Work for You
Hands-on workshop — Merve Isler
3:30 - 4:00 The Future of AI: Self-Learning Adaptive AI — Srini Pagidyala
Speakers & Sessions
9:00 – 10:00 am · What If Productivity Isn’t Agency?
Nicole Yue, Opening Keynote Speaker
Nicole Yue · Founder & CEO, Whole AI™ · Technology and transformation executive whose path spans psychology and human-development research at Georgetown University, neuroscience, Silicon Valley technology, product leadership, and the Federal Reserve. Today, her work explores AI, institutional transformation, trust, and the human systems shaping technological change.
10:00 am – 12:00 pm · Vibe Code a Startup in 2 Hours
Build an app & business like a pro using AI
Alisha Outridge · Serial 0-1 entrepreneur with exits to Apple + Brightspot, patent-holder, ex-Meta, Reuters, Brown University & Hunter College. Currently, runs Byte&Chord & teaches at AIFounderPlaybook.com.
The coding isn't the hard part anymore. Knowing exactly what to ask for is, and having someone next to you who does this every day.
In this hands-on workshop, participants will scope one idea on a single MVP sheet before any tools come out, turn that sheet into the prompt that builds the app in Lovable, then modify it live and connect it to GitHub so the work is version-controlled and the credits go where they should.
They'll leave with a working app they can send to someone, a repeatable idea-to-build workflow, and the muscle memory to do it again on their own. Tools we'll use: Claude, ChatGPT & Lovable.
12:00 – 12:30 pm · Lunch Break
12:30 – 12:55 pm · The History of Silicon Valley
How a Gold Rush became the center of the tech universe
Brett Waters · Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Stanford University
Silicon Valley didn't start with software — it started in 1849. From Gold Rush entrepreneurs and a railroad baron named Leland Stanford, to HP's garage, the invention of the transistor, the "traitorous eight," a 16-year-old Steve Jobs cold-calling the co-founder of HP, a Stanford professor who coined the term artificial intelligence, and a video game company that accidentally became an AI powerhouse — this talk tells the remarkable, interconnected story of how Silicon Valley came to be.
1:00 – 1:25 pm · The Human Advantage
Why the future of business is a return to knowing your customer
Zornitza Stefanova · Founder & CEO, BSPK · Building in Silicon Valley since the dotcom days
Between building an app this morning and building an agent this afternoon, this is the talk about what it's all for. We're all overwhelmed — more emails, more promotions, more noise. For decades, businesses tried to scale relationships with CRMs and rolodexes and lost the human in the process. But what every customer actually wants hasn't changed: to be known, to have their story understood, to be spoken to like a person rather than a segment. Zornitza asks the question underneath all the tools we're building: what is any of this for? Her answer: for the first time, AI makes it possible to truly know each customer as an individual, at scale, and to empower the people who serve them to show up with something meaningful to say. Whether you're a founder, a retailer, or building something brand new, this is a look at how AI is quietly reshaping the oldest thing in business — the relationship between a company and a person. It's a bookend to where we started this morning: every customer has a story, and now, finally, we can honor it.
1:30 – 3:25 pm · Building Agents
Put AI to Work for You
Merve Isler · Founder of Marvelous & AI Insiders · ex-Google Incubation Program Lead
Most people are still using AI like a smarter search box. The next step is giving AI a goal, context, and tools so it can actually help get work done.
In this hands-on workshop, participants will choose one real task from their work, turn it into a simple Agent PRD, and build and test a first version together.
They'll leave with a working agent, a reusable framework, and a practical understanding of where AI agents are useful and where human approval should stay in the loop.
Merve Isler is the Founder of Marvelous and AI Insiders and a former Google Incubation Program Lead. She has taught founders and professionals how to build with AI through hands-on workshops, including guest lecturing at Stanford.
3:30 – 4:00 pm · The Next Wave of AI
Compounding Intelligence Through Use — zero LLMs, no hallucinations, no retraining cycles
Srini Pagidyala · Co-Founder, Aigo.ai · Author of Growth Confidential
The whole day has been about building with today's AI. Srini closes by challenging it. His thesis is blunt: the dominant path — bigger models, bigger compute, deeper dependency — isn't leading to real intelligence, and it burns the planet for a prompt while eroding truth and trust along the way. Alongside AI pioneer Peter Voss, who co-coined the term "artificial general intelligence" in 2002, he's building the opposite at Aigo.ai: a cognition-first system that learns continuously from use, needs no retraining, doesn't hallucinate, and runs on a fraction — as little as a millionth — of the resources LLMs demand. For Srini the stakes are civilizational: AI should enhance human agency and protect your data, your privacy, and your memory, not concentrate them in the hands of a few. A provocative final note to send you home thinking about who the future of AI should actually belong to — the answer, he argues, is you.
Who This Is For
Founders and aspiring founders who want to build faster and smarter
Operators, marketers, and creatives ready to work with AI, not around it
Community builders and lifelong learners who want to understand the moment we're in
Anyone who's felt that AI is happening to them — and wants to change that
No technical background required. You'll leave with two things you built yourself and a real understanding of how we got here and where it's going.
Host:
Funding Breakthrough Lab is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit pre-accelerator with a mission of creating a supportive community (25,000+ subscribers) to build a better tomorrow. We support founder success not just startup success by ensuring founders have access to education, networks, and resources to unlock their potential.
Apply for the next cohort here https://fundingbreakthroughlab.org.
Subscribe to our events here https://luma.com/fbl
Sponsors:
AI Founder Playbook is Alisha Outridge's 15+ years building AI/ML products and years of teaching, packaged into one curriculum. It runs hands-on workshops, labs, hackathons and cohorts across the country, with Alisha as lead instructor alongside a network of working professionals. Most AI courses teach you to use AI. This Playbook teaches you to ship something worth doing. See what's coming up at https://aifounderplaybook.com
Byte&Chord is a venture studio and advisory firm. It builds AI products end to end, steps into companies as an Interim or Fractional CTPO when they need senior product and engineering leadership, and builds and launches its own products alongside client work. We build what ships, and the people who ship it. Tell us what you're working on at https://byteandchord.com
AI Insiders is a curated network for leaders building and shaping the future of AI. Through private dinners, executive roundtables, and vertical-specific gatherings, it brings together founders, investors, enterprise leaders, researchers, and policymakers for high-signal conversations and meaningful relationships across the AI ecosystem.
Whole AI™ is an independent advisory, research, and ecosystem platform helping enterprises and institutions make better decisions as they navigate technological change. Its work spans AI, enterprise transformation, trust, human systems, and institutional capability – through executive advisory, original research, strategic convenings, and cross-sector collaboration, with a focus on a fundamental question: how do we translate extraordinary technological capability into lasting value for organizations, institutions, and the people they serve?
Explore the work of Whole AI™ at wholeai.co or engage with Founder & CEO Nicole Yue on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.