Building Uber's AI Edge with Johannes Gehrke, AI Fellow • Surge & Peak XV
Introducing Surge Unfireside by Peak XV, where operators building the playbooks of world's fastest-growing AI companies join us to share the tactics, mistakes and lessons from the trenches. It's NOT a fireside, you hear their playbooks and get to brainstorm your thinking directly.
Why this could be of interest: Uber is the org that famously burned through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget in four months, one of the most aggressive AI adoption curves of any major enterprise. Johannes is now the one shaping how that AI infrastructure actually gets built.
For our third one, we have Johannes Gehrke, Uber's AI Fellow and a leading technical voice on how the company builds AI. A former Cornell professor turned Microsoft veteran, he helped build the infrastructure behind Teams and Azure, and now leads Uber's technical architecture for AI.
The build vs. buy call: How he decides when to build custom AI infrastructure in-house versus adopt off-the-shelf tools, a decision founders make constantly with a fraction of Uber's budget or team
Scaling under pressure: What actually breaks first when infrastructure hits 10x growth overnight, and what to over-invest in before you're forced to
Moving fast without breaking things: How to ship infrastructure changes at scale with zero customer-facing downtime, the discipline behind migrating live systems without anyone noticing
Where AI infra spend actually pays off: Which parts of the AI stack (inference, post-training, tooling) are worth building deep expertise in early versus outsourcing, and how that changes as you scale
What failed: Bets across a multi-decade infrastructure career that didn't work out, and what he'd do differently with what he knows now
This will be followed by an open discussion with the group to have time to discuss their top AI infrastructure and scaling questions with Johannes.
🚨 Curation: This is primarily for founders and technical leaders. We're keeping these small-group for high-impact discussion, we'll add you to the mailing list if you miss out this one and send the link for upcoming ones.