Join us for a closed-door conversation with AI researchers, builders, and founders exploring what drives AI performance beyond the model.
AI performance is no longer just about which model tops the leaderboard. As AI systems move from demos into real-world deployment, success increasingly depends on the full stack, from benchmarks and evals to agent harnesses, tools, reliability, infrastructure, and cost.
We’ll discuss evaluation, system design, reliability, infrastructure, inference economics, and what it takes to turn promising capabilities into scalable, durable products.
Speakers
Theresa Dai is an investor at Foothill Ventures, where she invests in Seed and Series A companies in both AI/Software and Healthcare/Life Sciences. Before entering venture capital, Theresa started her career in consulting and worked as a product manager, building several SaaS products from 0 to 1. Her expertise spans healthcare technology, data-driven solutions, and both vertical and horizontal AI startups. Theresa holds a Mathematics degree from Northwestern University and an MBA from MIT.
Vinay Seshadri is Senior Director of Product at Chargebee, where he leads monetization strategy for AI-native and B2C companies looking to grow and optimize revenue. He brings 18+ years of experience building and scaling B2B, B2C, and B2B2C technology products across startups and global markets. His work spans monetization strategy, business model development, product growth, experimentation, and customer experience.Charlotte Tao is a Principal in Frontier Solution Engineering at Turing, where she works with frontier AI labs on model post-training and evaluation. She has built her career across AI and autonomous systems at Uber, Zoox, Lyft, Salesforce, and Gruve. She also co-founded enterprise AI company Trusli and led it through acquisition. Throughout her career, she has focused on turning complex research problems into clear strategy, aligned teams, and shipped products.
Derek Zhang is the Founder of Stardust AI, where he leads the company’s work in AI data infrastructure and enterprise AI execution systems. A serial entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience spanning AI, data science, and quantitative finance, he has held senior roles at leading financial institutions and technology companies. Under his leadership, Stardust has grown into a global AI partner serving more than 500 customers across over 20 industries. His work focuses on bringing together high-quality data, expert knowledge, model evaluation, and enterprise memory to help organizations deploy AI in complex, real-world workflows.
Sponsors
Chargebee helps AI-native, SaaS, and consumer subscription businesses scale with billing and monetization infrastructure built for speed, flexibility, and rapid iteration.Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP is a global law firm advising technology companies, startups, investors, and other leading businesses across corporate, venture capital, intellectual property, regulatory, and transactional matters. Its Emerging Companies & Venture Capital practice works with founders and investors from company formation and fundraising through growth, M&A, and IPO.
Host
Foothill Ventures is a $300M fund that bets on highly technical, very early-stage companies in frontier tech. We are based in Los Altos, California. We are investing in seed and Series A startups in North America.
EchoHer is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering women and non-binary founders and funders by increasing their representation and success in entrepreneurship. We foster a supportive ecosystem that drives meaningful change and creates impactful opportunities through monthly events, co-working opportunities, curated networking sessions, pitch nights, and insightful panel discussions.
