Build From the Dock: How Open Source Built the AI Revolution
Venture Dock — Palo Alto
Thursday, July 16
5:00 – 7:30 PM (main conversation kicks off at 5:30)
A special Thursday edition of Build From Dock
We don't usually do Thursdays, but we're making an exception this week. Travis Oliphant, the guy who created NumPy and SciPy, started Anaconda and NumFOCUS, and now chairs Quansight and runs OpenTeams, is coming through to talk about how open source quietly became the backbone of the entire AI industry.
Why this matters
Everyone's talking about how fast AI is moving right now, but the tools underneath it, the math libraries, the compute frameworks, the stuff nobody thinks about, took decades to build, mostly by volunteers and small teams working in the open. Travis was there for a lot of that. If you use TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, or basically any modern ML tool, you're standing on code he wrote or communities he started.
We'll get into things like:
How open source ended up powering most of modern AI
Why open communities keep beating closed shops at building good software
Where AI infrastructure is headed next
What founders should actually know about the stack they're building on
How bigger companies are (finally) embracing open source AI
What 25+ years of building this stuff has taught him
This is for you if you're building AI products, leading an eng team, raising money, investing in this space, or just want to actually understand what's under the hood before everyone starts talking about the next thing.
About Travis Oliphant
Travis is one of those rare people whose work you've almost certainly used without knowing it. He created NumPy and SciPy, the foundational Python libraries that basically every data science, ML, and AI workflow is built on top of, TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX, and countless enterprise AI tools all trace back to the ecosystem he started.
Before any of that, he was a professor at Brigham Young University, doing research in probability, signal processing, computational math, and inverse problems. Since then he's spent over two decades founding and running organizations that shaped how open source and AI actually get built:
Creator of NumPy and SciPy
Founder and former CEO of Anaconda
Founder of NumFOCUS, which backs a lot of the most important open-source scientific computing projects out there
Chairman of Quansight
CEO of OpenTeams
Head of Open Source at Zyphra, working on next-gen multimodal AI
General Partner, Open Tech Ventures (OTVfund.com)
Millions of developers, researchers, and companies, from scrappy startups to the Fortune 500, rely on tools he built every single day, whether or not they realize it. He'll be sharing lessons from 25+ years at the center of open-source and AI development, and what he thinks founders need to understand about the technology (and the communities) underneath today's AI boom.
Agenda
5:00 – 5:30 — Coffee & networking
5:30 – 6:30 — Fireside chat with Travis
6:30 – 7:00 — Audience Q&A
7:00 – 7:30 — Founder networking
Who should come
AI founders, technical founders/CTOs, engineers, ML folks, data scientists, researchers, VCs, Stanford students, really anyone who cares about where AI and open source are headed.
Want more of this?
Build From the Dock is just one piece of Venture Dock, a community of founders and operators who actually show up for each other.
Venture Dock exists to give founders the tools to build, and build better. As a member, you get:
Office hours with experts across different verticals
Capital sessions with investors, including VC round panels and our quarterly demo day
Community connections to founders further along (or right there with you) — so you can learn from what they got wrong before you make the same mistakes
Visibility in a network that actually pays attention to who's building
Access to space and meeting rooms in Palo Alto and Milpitas when you need to get out of the house
If that sounds like your kind of thing, apply for membership here: 👉 https://venturedock.fillout.com/t/gHcUcf7Tz8us?utm_source=luma