What is the AI speaker series?

The AI speaker series is a set of evening talks we host at Sutter Hill Ventures, where people doing interesting work in AI come in and share it. Each event runs roughly 5:30 to 8 PM, and we make a custom poster for each speaker (honestly one of my favorite parts).

The range of topics is intentionally broad. As of October 2025, we'd done 2.5 years of the series and 17 presentations covering AI design, models, hardware, biology, and more. Early on we had Joon Park on Generative Agents and Jason Wei on Chain of Thought. From there it went in a lot of directions:

• Nafea Bshara on hardware innovation at scale.
• Tanja Kortemme's lab on protein design where physics-based modeling meets AI.
• Brian Hie on expanding genomic AI models to all domains of life.
• David Soria Parra, co-creator of the Model Context Protocol at Anthropic (MCP is a standard for connecting AI applications to tools and data).
• Ted Xiao from Google DeepMind on alternative paths to embodied intelligence.
• Nandita Dukkipati on the critical role of networking in the era of AI.

In April 2025 we expanded the series to design, kicking that off with Henry Modisett on "Designing Perplexity".

Next up is Crazy Agent Scale on November 19th: five engineers pushing AI agents past where most people stop, each walking through their workflow and setup.