#272 Andrew Blum: Inside The Most Important AI Event Of The Year (HumanX)

0:00Government regulation will play a role whether you wanted to or not. And so he kind of offered two scenarios. It was like, you can either have government not regulate you, and then something horrible happens. 2008. And then government steps in, and they're going to overregulate, because we're all going to remember what happened, and we're going to say, hey, you need to step in. This is messed up. At the end of the day, our business is about meeting people face-to-face, and it's about people, not technology. And that's why we call it human. Build the future of multi-agent software with agency. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y.

0:34The agency is an open source collective building the internet of agents. It's a collaborative layer where agents can discover, connect, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for interagent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows. Join Crew AI, Langchain, Llama Index, Browserbase, Cisco, and dozens more. The agency is dropping code, specs, and services. No strings attached. Build with other engineers who care about high-quality multi-agent software. Visit agency.org and add your support.

1:29That's A-G-M-T-C-Y dot O-R-G. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. I'm Andrew. I'm the co-founder and COO of HumanX. And I previously was working at a venture capital firm called Primary Ventures. So my background is really, you know, out of undergrad, I joined a startup that got acquired. worked there for a bit before leaving to actually start my own company ran a company for a year and a half and then left to join a venture fund to help them build out their incubation program where we would ideate new ideas hire entrepreneurs and residents to pursue those ideas and then support them after they were incubated with sales with marketing everything that you need as an early company to get going.

2:24And through that process, we were doing a lot of work on AI. And post-ChatGPT launch, we were thinking through what new products could we build for C-levels now that everyone is focused on LLMs and generative AI. And what we found was that there's a lot of products that were already out there. There wasn't necessarily a need for a new product, at least one that we found in our short research period. I'm sure there are tons of companies here that would disagree with me, which I love. But what we found was that there needed to be better curation of what was currently out there. It's really hard to know what's real and what isn't.

3:03It's really hard to know where you stand as it relates to your industry or your competitors. You know, whether it's you're running a marketing team and you need to know, am I using the most advanced AI software and technology to level up my own team or whether you're running an entire company and you need to figure out how to integrate AI into your product offering. And so there's so many dimensions to it that felt like they weren't being served by the current conferences that were out there. They were either very academic or they were very focused on really just thought leadership. And so we thought there needs to be a conference out there for these business leaders who are actually operating in the space every day but don't actually know what the products are being built, what's going on.

3:51LLMs are the first product really where it's a hammer in search of a nail. These products, they can do a ton of things really well. They can do other things not so well. It's super hard to know. And then every new model release brings with it advancements and also drawbacks. And so if you have a full-time job that's doing anything else, you can't keep up. I think we all know that. And so I think that's why people find it so valuable to bring all of these different parts of the ecosystem together. You know, I think the excitement and the energy here is something that we've felt for a year and a half and why we decided to build this.

4:26But it certainly exceeds our expectations in terms of just how great it's been and how happy and energized everyone is to be here. So we're super grateful and we're excited to be with you all. Yeah. Your background was in tech, adventure, and the startup before. Was all of that in tech? Was any of it in AI? It was all in tech. It wasn't AI at all, actually. So previously, I was working in the co-working space. It was like a hardware-software business, my last startup. The first company I joined was InsuranceTech, so I've been all over the map. Not AI in particular, but I think being at a venture firm when Gen.AI was brought to the front of the public imagination was, I think, that moment where we really felt, okay, this is the time where everyone's focusing on this and we're seeing the enterprise value materialize immediately.

5:24It's not like crypto or blockchain where we're still trying to figure out what the use cases, even in these cases where we're trying to figure out, you know, exactly what the what the nail is when we have this hammer, there are tons of nails and we just have to pick one and figure out what it's good at and make it work as opposed to something that I don't want to just pick on blockchain and crypto, but as opposed to something like that, where, you know, you're saying, well, you could do a bunch of things, but who knows here? We're seeing tangible results where you can be more efficient with your sales and make more sales.

5:54You can save costs on your operation side. You can cut back your accounting firm's spend because maybe you use less hours of the accountant. So there are so many things that are being done right now. And I think staying at the forefront is just so important. And that's why people came here. That's why they're so excited to hear what all of our incredible speakers have to say. We got a big crew over here. Those are my two co-founders, Stefan and John. Yeah, so I can give you kind of the story and the background of how this all came to be. So John is a longtime conference entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur of many stripes, not just conferences.

6:30So I'll kind of start with his background because I think it's the most relevant. So he actually sold the tech company to Google way back when, and it became the basis for Google Wallet right as fintech was getting started. and he started going to conferences in the fintech space in this like nascent industry that didn't really exist and what they found was that actually most of the conferences he went to either as a speaker or as a sponsor were pretty low rli and being an entrepreneur and someone who can kind of just hit hit the ground running and figure out what's not working he said well i think i can do it better and he started a conference called money 2020 that went on to become the largest fintech conference in the world.

7:09They have now conferences in the US and Europe and Asia, and they're a very well-respected brand. And so then he developed this playbook and he repeated it with Shop Talk, an e-commerce conference, and then repeated it with a conference called Health and Vive in the healthcare innovation space. And so Primary, my old firm that I worked at, they had invested in Health and in Shop Talk. So they knew a little bit about the model. They were interested in kind of investing in another business like it. And it was really that coalescing of having this model and then also going out and seeing kind of the need in the market for understanding this technology, where it plays in and just getting the right people in a room together, which, believe it or not, is is is hard to do.

7:54And it's funny because it's it's an AI conference. But like at the end of the day, our business is about meeting people face to face and it's about people, not technology. And that's why we call it human act. You got together with him and then the other. Yeah. And then Stefan, my CEO, so where he comes into all this. So Stefan is a longtime tech exec. He was the head of Bing for a while, worked at Microsoft under Satya, under Gates. He was at Microsoft for a long time. So from Gates to Satya. And so he is friends with John. They have a venture capital fund together. They've known each other and been business partners for a few years now.

8:34And so John was working at his last conference, Health. So he couldn't be the CEO of this business. He's our chairman and he's been incredibly helpful. We couldn't do it without him, but he couldn't be the day-to-day CEO. And so he said, actually, I have a friend who is currently unemployed, if you call it, running a venture fund on the side and being unemployed, but unemployed and nonetheless was looking for another kind of route. and so you know we met up we went to John's other conferences we went to health we went to money 2020 just to see the scale and kind of the production value as you can tell it's quite different than other conferences and I should say for all of these he sold all of the other ones at this point so you know I can't really speak to what they look like today but I know when he started them and when they were running them they looked a lot like this and so and so he said I have this friend who you know who's unemployed and would be interested in doing this and so So we kind of got together.

9:27We listened to what John had to say about how to do this. You know, we talked it over. Then Steph and I kind of scoured the U.S. looking for other AI conferences. We went to a whole bunch. And we just found, like, you know what? They weren't targeting this audience. They weren't executive level. They weren't for business leaders. And they weren't doing it the way that John would do it and making it this really experiential thing with dogs and massages and martinis. And so we said we can do it better. Yeah. I go to a lot of conferences. As I say, I tend to go to the research conferences, but I get invited to conferences all over the world.

10:03How, you know, I'm busy. I can't get to all the conferences that I'm invited to. People are busy, and whether or not they fit the market that you see, they're still drawing people. how do you get people to come and you have a really strong lineup of speakers you know it's one of those snowball effects where once you have you know some of your top five speakers like once you say okay the ceo snowflake is coming um you know once you say the co-founder of hugging face is coming or the ceo of mr all or the chief product officer of open ai chief product officer of anthropic vinod khosla i can go on and on you know it makes it a much easier sell of course to other people because they say one i want to see myself next to them and two i want to meet them and like hey they're building something really interesting and you know we had the um the chief data officer of mcdonald's here like they're like hey maybe we could do something you know and collaborate with open ai for example so i think once you get the first few then then you're golden and it's a lot easier um you know for us uh getting those first few were really in part due to the incredible network of Stefan and John.

11:16They've been working in tech for decades, Stefan in particular, and so it was just really easy to get calling up his friends, whether it was Gina of Mighty Networks or Sean White of Inflection, and say, hey, can you do me a solid? And believe in us, that we're going to tell you we're going to bring 3 ,300 people to this thing, and it's going to be incredible, and we're going to have the top speakers in AI, but obviously when we started, we didn't, and so they believed in us, which was required. someone had to and um and then you know it's kind of that snowball well then okay we'll get the co-founder of databricks too and this guy wants to come and that guy wants to come and so um and so yeah that's that's kind of how you do it but uh but yeah it was it took a lot of work and we have an entire speaker team that you know all day every day spends um spends their waking hours like booking people and and getting the right folks in the room and putting together these incredible uh panels and discussions so um you know we couldn't do it without them yeah I got to ask, who were the first two guys that you nailed down as the magnet for the others?

12:19Oh, my God. That's a great question. I'm going to have to look back at my notes. So I can tell you some early people who believed in us when we didn't have a lot of other folks. So we had Gina, obviously, who I mentioned already, and Sean. We had someone named Michael Miskiewicz, who is a head of data science at Yext. Really great guy. You know, it was a lot of cold emailing at that point, cold LinkedIn messaging. He took a meeting with us. He was like, yeah, I'm down. Great. So that was really great. And then Bin Nee from Google, he's like the head of Applied AI, I believe. Super super nice guy.

13:00And you know, we pitched him on our vision and he said, sure, I'll come. and yeah it was really special to be able to meet those people in person and say like you know this looks great and we know it looks great but we couldn't have done it without kind of your early belief in us so yeah what was the lead time when did you start we started a year and a half ago so we raised around to put this on our VC back business we raised around and then we you know just went and started recruiting on all fronts speakers sponsors attendees and yeah here we are Yeah. And so somebody like CEO of Mistra. Yeah.

13:36He's not an easy guy to get. No. I mean, after you get the first few, then you start reaching out to the friends, so to speak. And then you start going after these top guys. Is that not that the friends are not top people, but, you know, the bigger company names. Yeah. Is that just, again, through the network? Build the future of multi-agent software with agency. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y. The agency is an open source collective building the internet of agents. It's a collaborative layer where agents can discover, connect, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for interagent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

14:38Join Crew AI, Langchain, Llama Index, Browserbase, Cisco, and dozens more. The agency is dropping code, specs, and services. No strings attached. Build with other engineers who care about high-quality multi-agent software. Visit agency.org and add your support. That's A-G-N-T-C-Y dot O-R-G. No. No. The big people are just like, you know, we have a very, very persistent speaker team. And so, you know, there's one person I could think of in particular who would go and say, you know, hey, we have this great lineup. Do you want to come? No reply. One week later, hey, we added these two people to lineup.

15:35Do you want to come? They're like, no, we can't. OK. Another week. Hey, we have two more people. you want to come no uh and so he just keep at it keep at it keep at it sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't um but uh you know it's just that like startup energy of being persistent and just go and going after what you want um and trying to keep getting better and better and hopefully that attracts what you're looking for um and i think in a lot of cases it did so we're super grateful to be here yeah so you're venture backed and and the business model is you're sponsorship driven right exactly there's no gate or you know i mean people aren't paying to come to the conference or are they oh yeah yeah they're paying okay oh yeah so our our business model is media isn't paying oh yeah i didn't pay no no no we don't want you to pay uh you're you're doing hard work over here um but yes no people are uh people are paying to attend the conference um so yeah ticket sales uh ticket sales are our revenue stream and then um sponsorships so that's yeah that's what we do Yeah, because I'm impressed with the spectrum of sponsors that you have here.

16:44That was my job, so thank you. Oh, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Is that just cold calling, or are there agencies that you go to to put that together? Oh, it was a whole bunch of work, and it was not an agency. No, it was a really, really ambitious, scrappy team. It was myself and two other full-time people just pounding the pavement. You know, it's finding the right contacts, finding the right companies, figuring out what the angle is to get them here and why they'd be relevant. And I mean, it's so gratifying. We were just, I was walking in with a sponsor who stopped me and he was like, hey, we've had like so many amazing conversations.

17:20Like our sponsorship is worth five times the ROI that we paid. And like, you know, we're just like really happy to be here and we're super grateful that you included us. And you know, this isn't like a nothing company. They raised a couple hundred million bucks. They've, you know, they know what they're doing. but it's really great to hear like you know we believe that we can bring the right people together to like make deals happen to make sales to make investments happen in people's companies and so when I hear stories of that happening that just warms my heart yeah and what where does it go from here I mean presumably you're into planning next year bigger and better bigger and better we're heading to San Francisco next year so we're going to be at the Moscone Center April 7th to 9th.

18:00Next year. Yeah, and we're going to double. So whatever you think this is, it's nothing compared to next year. And at what point, I mean, if you're venture-backed, I know that you're a private company, you don't need to tell me, but at what point do you break even and start making money in the business plan? It's a great question. you know come back to me after I take a look at the bill from the hotel you know but it's a good question probably like you know hopefully next year we'll be breaking even we might be breaking even now you know I actually just we have to reconcile so we're in the middle of this right now we've got no idea what we're doing but the model is like hopefully we can break even you know in the next 12 months and so we don't anticipate raising another round yeah yeah and And what happens after this?

18:53Because you collect a lot of assets, you know, videos and transcripts and all this stuff. This is the age of AI. It is. And this is an AI conference. Do you do something with all that data that comes out of the conference? Oh, man, we do a lot. I'm going to forget. I mean, it's not my job, so I'm not as tuned in, but we do a lot. And I think I hear some of those dogs barking, which is great. One of the best things about the conference, in my opinion, is having the dog park and being able to like, you know, you've got a five minute break, go and pet a Great Dane dog you would never like interact with, you know, out on the street.

19:35It's perfect. But yeah, I mean, so the pictures and videos, we're going to update all of our materials. You know, a lot of our pictures were just like taken offline and like Photoshopped with the HumanX logo. ago. So now we have real pictures. We can actually show people what it's going to be like to attend our event in San Francisco. So that's really the main thing is like being able to update our website, all of our marketing materials, obviously our socials and LinkedIn and all that. In addition to that, we're going to be... What else are we doing? That's a good question. I mean, we have a lot.

20:09Are there any revenue streams that come out after the fact of that material? Or is it Primarily marketing. There should be, but I don't know if you can think of a way to get me some revenue from it. I'm all ears. We have a partnership with Getty Images. So you can find Human X photos on Getty. So if you search Human X, for example, journalists will pull the ad and other folks. So you can find pictures from Kamala on Sunday and others, which is really great. Hopefully some Wyclef pictures from the party tonight. But yeah, other than that, no, it's really just marketing and trying to give people a sense of like the scale and the, you know, kind of like the energy and the effort and the enthusiasm that we put into the event and that I feel like you get back out when you see these pictures.

20:54Yeah. I didn't, I missed Kamala Harris. I was still on a plane, but how difficult was it to get her? It was pretty difficult. I mean, she was, it was the first paid speaking gig after she lost the election. So, you know, we were super grateful to have her. I think she gave a wonderful speech. She is a politician who I think, regardless of your political views, she was the second most important person in the country for four years. And she was the AI czar and was responsible for a lot of the AI policy. And so at HumanX, we believe that it's really important to have this dialogue between industry and government, because at the end of the day, government's going to set the rules of the road, whether you like it or not.

21:37And I think we also had Representative Obernolte here as well. And what he had to say, which I thought was really fascinating, was that regardless of government regulation will play a role, regardless of whether you wanted to or not. And so he kind of offered two scenarios. It was like, you can either have government not regulate you, and then something horrible happens. 2008. Something catastrophic. Hopefully not that bad, but something bad happens. And then government steps in and they're going to overregulate because we all have a very short memory. We're going to remember our very long memory.

22:17Rather, we're all going to remember what happened and we're going to say, hey, like you need to step in like this is this is messed up. Or you can have government add some regulations earlier and then hopefully events like that don't happen. And so you can prevent something like that. And then maybe you can get to a place where actually you have more tempered and more regulated regulation is a little redundant, but like, you know, a little bit more tempered regulation at the end of the day. And so I think that's what everyone's looking for is like they need to know that there are rules of the road and that they're not going to get just pushed off the side of a highway because, hey, I want to do something.

22:52So I'm going to like create this law and it's going to totally make all these companies now worthless. Yeah. I know you're busy. I can't imagine all the details you have to deal with. But are you able to sort of have an overview of what's going on in AI through this conference? Or is that asking too much? I did hear some talks from backstage when I was introducing people. So, you know, I heard about like AI21 Labs introducing their new model, which I think is fantastic and super, super interesting. Some new white papers that came out. I know Visa introduced one last night at a reception, which looked really phenomenal.

23:34So I know there's a lot going on. I can't say that I've kept up with all of it, so I'm going to need to go do my homework after this. But no, I mean, there's been so much news broken at this event, and I'm really grateful for that. But it's too much for me to keep up with, so I'm going to have to go do some homework. Yeah, yeah. And how many sponsors? How many exhibitors? I don't know the exact number of exhibitors, but we have 153 sponsors. Okay. 3 ,300 attendees. Yeah. 350 speakers. Yeah. 200 media and press. Yeah. So, you know, we're super, super proud of what we built, and we hope you enjoy it.