Building in the Age of AI
Be in the same room with other ambitious CMU alumni building in AI from across the Bay Area featuring a panel of five CMU alumni who sit at different vantage points of this exciting AI shift.
🤝 Connect With Other CMU AI Builders
This event is designed around meaningful connections, not just hearing from the stage. We'll be curating attendees for this event to Tartans who are actively building or leading in AI right now. Attendance will be capped and curated.
What we'll dig into:
• What AI actually changed about starting a company in 2026, and what hasn't changed
• Build in-house vs buy from a lab vs buy from a startup, and who keeps the value
• What "AI-native" looks like inside a company day to day, not as a pitch line
• What each of them would be scared to start right now
• Lab, startup, or fund: how they'd pick today
Panelists
Justin Zhu —co-founder of Iterable ($2B), now building Mithra
Rachel Wong — CTO & Partner at Basis Set Ventures, built the firm's internal AI deal-evaluation system
Sid Malladi — Founder & CEO of Nuvo, AI-native order-to-cash for B2B trade (Sequoia, Founders Fund)
Rohan Varma — Product Lead on Codex at OpenAI, first PM at Cursor, founded Clarity (acquired by Cursor)
Aatish Nayak (moderator) — Partner at Kleiner Perkins, previously Shield AI, Scale AI, Harvey
Schedule
5:00–5:30pm — Registration
5:30–6:00pm — Dinner
6:00–6:45pm — Panel discussion
6:45–7:00pm — Small-group breakout discussions
7:00–7:30pm — Open networking
Approval only. Thank you to our sponsors Aatish & Justin.
Hosted by CMU Tech & Entrepreneurship & Mithra.