Boulder Startup Week 2024

AI has drastically changed the world around us. Building products on frontier technology like LLMs brings with it a unique set of challenges: some old, some new. With an unprecedented amount of capital being poured into AI startups, the necessity to out-execute the competition brings bleeding-edge research and asymmetric insights to the forefront of any winning product strategy. Additionally, building on technology that the broad population views with a mixture of excitement and skepticism is a challenge that harkens back to inventions as disruptive as the combustible engine and the light bulb.  
How should startups tackle these old and new problems? How do you build trust with users who are told by pop culture and media not to trust AI? How do you find insights that get you to your next breakthrough? 

In this fireside chat, Katie Johnson and Zach Herring will share with BSW attendees the things that they see changing about building products in this new age (spoiler alert: iteration will be faster than ever, both in development and user feedback, and product research as a practice will be rewritten from the ground up) as well as to reflect on the tried-and-true product development wisdom that is still relevant while building in and with this new technology. Katie and Zach will reflect on their evolving philosophies and predictions for the next 2-5 years followed by an interactive Q&A for the community to ask questions and share wisdom with each other. 
Zach Herring and Katie Johnson have over 30 years of experience building and launching lean businesses at the intersection of emergent technology and deep user needs. Zach has worked with product teams in frontier tech since 2017, first designing ML and Digital Twin platforms with Ellie Mae and GE R&D, then Web3 in 2018 in protocol design and onchain art. Katie served as the lead UXR for 0-1 products inside Google from 2020-2023, including leading UXR for the first launch of Bard (now Gemini), and has built products and services at the intersection of emergent tech and human needs her entire career.