StrictlyVC – Los Angeles
February 29, 2024 — Los Angeles
Speakers
Faraz Fatemi
PartnerLightspeed Venture Partners
Tekedra Mawakana
Co-CEOWaymo
Trae Stephens
General PartnerFounders Fund
Meredith Whittaker
PresidentSignal
Jesse Lyu
Founder and CEOrabbit
Faraz graduated from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and currently lives in Los Angeles with his fiancée and goldendoodle. When he’s not investing, advising or building communities, he loves exploring all LA has to offer – “beautiful beaches, amazing hikes, and delicious food.” And despite moving to Southern California, he remains a devoted Bay Area sports fan.
Faraz's Sessions
Opening Remarks with Lightspeed Venture Partners
Tekedra N. Mawakana is the co-CEO of Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company. As co-CEO, Tekedra oversees the company’s strategy for the wide adoption of the Waymo Driver. She boasts 20+ years of experience advising consumer technology companies to advance their business interests globally. Tekedra currently serves on the Board of Directors for Intuit and the Advisory Council for Boom Technology. She is a social impact-focused angel investor and an Advisor and LP with the Operator Collective.
Tekedra's Sessions
An Autonomous Vehicle Tipping Point
Waymo, a unit of Alphabet, has been at the forefront of autonomous vehicle technology development for more than a decade. Now Waymo is leading the way on commercial robotaxi service — even as controversy continues to swirl around the industry. Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, will discuss the company’s progress and potential setbacks in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco as well as how and if the industry can survive recent pushback from regulators and the public.
Prior to Palantir, Trae worked as a computational linguist building enterprise solutions to Arabic/Persian name matching and data enrichment within the United States Intelligence community. He began his career working in the office of then Congressman Rob Portman and in the Political Affairs Office at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. immediately following the installation of Hamid Karzai’s transitional government. Trae graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Trae's Sessions
The Future of Defense Funding
Join us for a conversation about current and emerging funding trends in the defense industry. We’ll explore this topic with Trae Stephens, a partner at Founders Fund. Stephens is also the co-founder and chairman of Anduril Industries, a non-traditional defense contractor using AI and other advanced technologies to reshape the defense industry and transform U.S. and allied military capabilities. Prior to joining Founders Fund, Stephens was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, where he led teams focused on growth in the intelligence/defense space and international expansion, as well as helping large organizations solve their hardest data analysis problems.
Meredith Whittaker is Signal’s President. She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. And she recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.
Meredith's Sessions
There’s Nothing “Open” about AI. Here’s Why That Matters
An influential handful of AI companies keep pushing a false narrative — that the technology is “open.” Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal and co-founder of the AI Now Institute at NYU, begs to differ. Join us for a conversation as Whittaker explains why, if we want the technology to grow and mature — outside of their control — we need to stop “openwashing” and insist on true open source to empower bottom-up innovation.Meredith Whittaker is one of the most respected privacy experts and major tech leaders willing to call out AI’s threat as “a surveillance technology.” Her industry, academic and government work has shaped global AI policy, and she has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and other governments and civil organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence and internet policy.
Jesse Lyu, Founder and CEO of rabbit Inc., is a serial entrepreneur dedicated to creating the most intuitive human-machine interaction. A two-time YC alumni, Jesse founded Raven Tech in 2013 and built a natural language-powered operating system that was later deployed into one of the best-selling smart speakers. The form factors and software designs are still used as some of the industry standards today. Jesse serves on the board of directors at Teenage Engineering and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2016.
Jesse's Sessions
Rabbit's High-risk Hardware Play Gets the Jump on AI Rivals
While global tech titans try to shoehorn AI into their existing products, Rabbit is making a fast break past them with its dedicated handheld assistant. Jesse Lyu joins us to talk about the startup’s high-risk, high-reward attempt to create a new product category.
