AI Lessons from Silicon Valley’s Llama Lounge 17: Stick with the Basics

By David Sapoznikow, VP Technology at Material

As AI advances quickly, the speed creates more questions than answers. Businesses want to know how to use it effectively, talk about it clearly and guide their customers. Silicon Valley’s Llama Lounge 17 (“The AI Startup Event”) accentuated the importance of the basics: even in this changing landscape, success starts by prioritizing customers over technology and meeting them where they are. 

Where is the AI puck going? 

The former hockey player Brooks Laich once said, “If you want money, go to the bank. If you want bread, go to the bakery. If you want goals, go to the net.” And so it is with AI. In order to glimpse where the puck is moving, go where the next generation of AI/business offerings emerge. That is the explicit purpose of the Llama Lounge AI startup events.  

The event brought together a group of 700 AI founders, enterprises, students and, notably, investors (follow the money). The occasion showcased 10 startups who appealed to both technologists and businesspeople at Stanford University’s Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center. The series, hosted by Blitzscaling Ventures’ Jeremiah Owyang and emceed by his partner Chris Yeh, provides a view of how bleeding-edge innovation can be used within a practical business context. 

 What does AI mean to my business? 

The breadth of industries across the 10 startups emphasizes the inevitability of AI for every business. Offerings in beauty, finance, health, retail, sales and science present clear usefulness for developers as well as anyone with a PC. The common thread running through their experiences is how they use AI in service of potential customers. Each has specific target audiences, deploys AI tools to solve real business challenges and articulates their relevance and value in a simple and accessible manner (“Turn 45 days into minutes,” “Create in hours, not months,” “Has anyone tried to Google their symptoms on the internet?”).  

These startups stand out among their peers not only in how they use AI to build powerful offerings, but in how they position and articulate their value.  This unusually disciplined behavior highlights a gap: the AI market is over-indexed on technology and underweight in communicating business value. For all the excitement about its transformative potential, the value of AI lies in its ability to help businesses find new ways to identify, define and address customer needs.  

Chris shared a story from the 1998 movie Armageddon, where Ben Affleck’s hilarious commentary track muses about the choice of specialists sent to handle an asteroid careening towards Earth. Why was it easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts rather than the other way around? Expanding on Director Michael Bay’s take (“Shut up, Ben”), the drillers provided the right specialization for the job. In our case, today’s AI space has more tech-focused “astronauts” working on features and functions than “drillers” skilled at tapping into major deposits of business value. As a result, the value of AI often gets lost as companies focus on features instead of impact. Companies who succeed with AI empower their drillers to know their customers, what matters and how to reach them. 

What are agents and how and when will they change our lives? 

AI agents are top of mind, so it is not surprising that nine of the 10 startups involve agentics. Many more are on their way across a growing breadth of use cases and industries. Agents are commonly defined as LLM (large language model) powered tools that can interact with their environments, reason, learn and act with autonomy on behalf of their users. Autonomy characterizes this latest entry along the continuum of initially confusing technologies that go mainstream such as generative AI, apps and the cloud. This group promises tangible value in the form of new abilities and superpowers that automate grunt work and free workers to perform more interesting tasks.  

AI agents are already interacting with each other, and it is easy to imagine nightmare scenarios where technology replaces people. However, more plausible scenarios have us realizing value through AI collaboration. This represents change, uncertainty and risk along with opportunities. How should companies clearly communicate the value of AI-infused offerings while reassuring customers that disaster is not around the corner? The basics: know your customers, what matters to them and how to reach them. 

What does this mean for people’s jobs? 

They will change. If they have changed already, they will change more. Agents and other flavors of AI can enhance our abilities by expanding what is possible and replace the rote or unnecessary. Opportunities and personal risks will expand constantly, and imagining how one can evolve to be more successful via collaboration with AI is now a requirement. 

We face forced evolution, but the human factor is not disappearing. In the midst of this celebration of disruption, Llama Lounge hosts Jeremiah and Chris implicitly accentuate the importance of people. Jeremiah’s personal touch creates a growing community that values meeting in person, as exemplified by the visceral reaction to the ritual blowing of the introductory conch. Chris emcees with an inimitable joy and skill that keeps standing-room-only crowds engaged. 

We can be stubborn and take a “We’re not going anywhere” attitude. Yet we are moving, not-so-gently nudged towards the future. It is better to say “We’re adaptably here” with updated skillsets and recognize the opportunity to improve albeit with some friction. Our customers are going through the same process. Their friction can be mitigated if we strive to go beyond the technology and – say it with me – know our customers, what matters to them and how to reach them. 

For those interested in the Blitzscaling Ventures Llama Lounge 17 lineup

• #AI-MD - local diagnosis 
• *ComputerX - AI sidekick for computer automation/desktop automation agent 
• *Exo - financial risk analysis agent 
• #Glamir - personal AI makeup consultant 
• **Guiden - enterprise AI creation platform 
• *Palona - AI sales agents for consumers and businesses 
• *Potpie - agents for automating s/w development workflows 
• ##Remix - spatial AI for business location management 
• *Synexis - deal flow platform for investors, startups and enterprises powered by AI agents and experts 
• *Tensorstax - agents providing autonomous AI for data engineering 

* = specifically referenced as agent 

** = agent platform 

# = agent-like 

## = ripe for agentic integration