INVITATION ONLY
Where the people building
the frontier meet
A closed-door gathering of senior engineers, technical founders, and operators shaping the next era of frontier AI, inference, and physical AI.
ATTENDANCE IS LIMITED
Built for the people doing the work
Goanna Builders Day, co-hosted with Founders Inc at Fort Mason, brings together ~200 senior builders from The Goanna Collective, ~100 early stage startup founders, and invited guests for an afternoon of candid technical conversation. Closed-door panels, fireside chats, and spotlights led by the people doing the work.
Featured speakers
[panel]Jason Clinton
Deputy CISO
+ more to be announced
THE FORMAT
One afternoon. Seven sessions.
A focused half-day — roughly four hours of substantive conversation, shaped by the room and the people in it.
- [01]·Welcome
Opening Remarks
A short framing of the day from the Goanna team and the founders building it.
Hosted by Rob Hilmer & Tripp Conrad.
- [02]·Panel
Agentic Reliability
Senior operators on what production agentic systems actually do when they fail — the technical decisions, trade-offs, and failure modes you don't hear on stage.
PanelistsJason Clinton — AnthropicMichael Shi — ClickHouseMaxim Fateev — TemporalLedion Bitincka — CriblModeratorJigyasa Grover — Uber
- [03]·Spotlight
Mythos & the End of Vulnerabilities
On the myths, realities, and hard problems of securing AI at the frontier.
Jason Clinton, Deputy CISO at Anthropic.
- [04]·Fireside
Industrial AI & Computer Vision Moats
An intimate, off-the-record conversation on what it takes to build a defensible applied AI company in real-world environments.
Reza Zadeh (CEO & Founder, Matroid) in conversation with Rishabh Misra (Principal ML Lead, Atlassian).
- [05]·Panel
Production AgentsFrom Inference to Trust
A panel on inference economics, moats in the AI application layer, and what it takes to run agentic systems at production scale.
PanelistsJonatan von Martens — ElevenLabsIbrahim Ahmed — inference.netTina Ding — RilletModeratorAngel Ramirez — Cuemby
- [06]·Spotlight
Inference at Scale
On the state of inference — performance, economics, and what's coming next.
Pavneet Singh Ahluwalia, Product Lead at Together AI.
- [07]·Panel
AI Systems for the Physical World
A panel on building frontier AI that operates in the real world — robotics, climate, manufacturing, and the systems that ship intelligence beyond the screen.
PanelistsJohn Mern — Terra AIMichal Valko — Isara LabsModeratorRaul Romero — Kite ML
Private sessions with the people defining what gets built next.
Representation from across the frontier
