Category: venture-capital

• HumanX is a new conference focused on AI that was held in Las Vegas.
• The thousands of attendees who paid $995 to $3995 for a ticket craved human connection.
• Next to the main stage, there was a speakeasy, massage booth, and a dog park.

It was late Wednesday night inside a crowded Las Vegas nightclub at the closing party for HumanX, a new conference focused on AI, when Wyclef Jean, wiping the sweat from his face after performing for more than an hour, walked offstage into the crowd.

He finished his set, snaking through a crowded sea of people patting Jean on his shoulders and snapping selfies on their iPhones.

At a conference all about AI, the thousands of attendees who paid $995 to $3995 for a ticket still craved human connection, whether it was brushing up against a Haitian rap legend, mingling at the seemingly endless happy hours celebrating new AI startups, or getting to meet face-to-face with a famous venture capitalist.

“It’s unlikely a Midwestern CTO at a manufacturing company is ever going to be sitting in a room with Vinod Khosla,” Stefan Weitz, the co-founder, and CEO of HumanX, told me, referring to the founder of Khosla Ventures, who was one of the first investors in OpenAI. “That’s really why you come to an in-person conference.”

Khosla joined Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra, OpenAI CTO Kevin Weil, and dozens of other speakers who participated in intimate Q&A roundtables. They were HumanX’s most popular sessions, with lines sometimes stretching more than 400 people to get a seat.

“When my team first pitched me the idea, I thought there was no way our big speakers were going to do a Q&A with random people, but 100 said ‘yes’ on the spot,” Weitz said. “To be in a room with Kevin [Weil] and when he can literally look in the eyes of people that are using his product every day and asking questions as a product person, that’s really powerful.”

Weitz, a former longtime senior director at Microsoft, founded HumanX with event producer Jonathan Weiner — who previously launched mega conferences HLTH, Shoptalk, and Money20/20.

They wanted to capitalize on the tech obsession of the moment and raised $6.2 million in venture funding from Primary Ventures, Foundation Capital, and FPV Ventures, which is helpful because events like these usually take years to become profitable.

“The food and beverage alone is multiple millions of dollars,” Weitz said. “We knew we were going to lose money in year one.”

Next year’s event will pack in twice as many attendees and be held in San Francisco.

“80% of the funding last year in AI went to Bay Area companies,” Weitz said. “I think we’ll have even more amazing speakers because it’s a schlep to get here.”

Gambling on AI

To reach this year’s HumanX, I had to make my way every morning through the cavernous 150,000-square-foot casino at the new Fountainbleau Las Vegas, walking past beeping slot machines and vacationers sipping free drinks at the craps table.

I asked Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures if he had time to play any blackjack in between speaking on stage and meeting with founders and other VCs.

“I don’t gamble,” Das said. “I gamble enough with my LPs money.”

It was hard to miss the metaphor of what is happening in venture investing right now — investors betting billions on AI companies, hoping they will hit the jackpot even as few payouts happen because the IPO market has been largely frozen.

“Let’s call the whole ecosystem to task,” Katelin Holloway, founding partner at 776, said on stage. “The valuations are so inflated it doesn’t make sense to go public.”

If that all sounds nerve-wracking, perhaps that is why, next to the main stage, there was a speakeasy, massage booth, and a small dog park where attendees could pet well-behaved pooches while listening to panels featuring Anthropic CPO Mike Kreiger, Sequoia partner Alfred Lin, and former Vice-President Kamala Harris.

“It was a good break to disconnect from the craziness of the conference,” said Steffan Mos, a sales manager at Vectera who took a few minutes to linger at the dog park with his CEO. “It brings the human element to the HumanX conference.”