/ About this event
Most of this week's AI conversation is about software. This one is about what happens when frontier models meet the physical world — biology, materials, hardware — and about the part that rarely gets discussed on stage: how those companies get found years before they look fundable.
Yelena Bisharyan has been on both sides of that gap. She evaluated university inventions at Harvard's Office of Technology Development, then left to co-found and run Trillion Bio, a drug delivery company out of the Mitragotri lab. She'll talk about what she saw that never became a company and why, and what she knew as an insider that she couldn't use until she was the founder.
Alex Dang works the other end. A former McKinsey partner who led AI at Amazon and AWS, and co-author of the bestselling The Venture Mindset, he'll get into where large enterprises actually absorb AI-and-atoms systems versus where they stall — and what that determines about which deep tech companies reach revenue.
Then we open the floor. We're building the room deliberately: university commercialization offices, accelerator and incubator leads, corporate R&D, and investors active in deep tech. Several guests are pre-briefed to speak. The discussion is meant to be with the audience, not at it.
Format: 10-minute framing talk, 30-minute conversation, 30 minutes open discussion, then drinks until 7. Capped at 70.
Facilitated by Manuk Hergnyan, Managing Partner of Hermenica Capital. He co-founded Granatus Ventures, Armenia's first venture fund, and has spent fifteen years building the institutions that source technical founders before they incorporate.
Hosted by Hermenica Capital — a deep tech fund investing at the collision of intelligence and matter. Recent investments include Core Automation, the AI research lab founded by Jerry Tworek (previously VP of Research at OpenAI), and Trillion Bio.
This event is a part of #SFTechWeek—a week of events hosted by VCs and startups to bring together the tech ecosystem. Learn more at www.tech-week.com
