This year, OpenAI started letting people connect their medical records and Apple Health data to ChatGPT.

Since 2024, Americans can buy a continuous glucose monitor without a prescription.

For most of the Quantified Self movement's history, answering a question with your own data meant manual logs and spreadsheets. Today a sensor collects the data and an AI model analyzes it on demand.

That leaves every founder building in this space with one hard question: when an AI's answer changes what someone eats or takes, how do they know it's right?

Gary Wolf has spent nearly 20 years watching people try to answer questions with their own data.

He co-founded Quantified Self with Kevin Kelly, joined the WIRED editorial team in 1994, became the first executive producer of Wired Digital, and launched Wired News. His New York Times Magazine cover story on self-tracking brought the practice to a mainstream audience, and his TED talk on the subject has been watched more than a million times.

His current work is about AI and personal data. He's researching a cryptographic protocol to prove where sensor data came from at the moment it's recorded, and writing essays on how people talk to AI chatbots.

His new book, The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe, lays out a method anyone can use to test a question against their own data.

On Thursday, October 15, Gary joins Startup Grind to talk about what AI changes for people using their own data, and what that means for the founders building those products.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

  • What AI changed for self-trackers: The analysis Quantified Self members once did by hand, and what a user can now do in one conversation with a model.

  • When to trust a model's answer: How to tell when an AI reading of your sleep or blood sugar holds up, and what a user needs before acting on it.

  • Proving where data came from: Gary's research on verifying sensor data at the moment it's recorded, and what it means for products that make health claims.

  • Building around the user's question: The question, observe, reason, discover method from his new book, and how to design a product around what a user is actually asking.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

  • AI health and wellness founders: Your model tells people what their data means, and they're going to act on it.

  • Wearable and sensor founders: You collect the data, and your users can now hand it to an AI to interpret.

  • AI product builders in any category: You're shipping personalized advice and want to hear from someone who has studied how people make sense of their own numbers for nearly 2 decades.

  • Founders who track themselves: You've already asked a chatbot about your sleep data and want to know how far to trust the answer.

Tickets for this event include food and drinks, as well as time with Gary after the chat to ask about your own product.

BONUS: you'll have an opportunity to purchase Gary's new book and get your copy signed by the author, himself!

You'll also meet dozens of other high-performing entrepreneurs who are creating their next big thing. Seriously, it's some of the best founder networking in the city.

Getting a ticket guarantees admission. No waitlisting.

AGENDA

  • 6:00 PM: Networking, Food & Drinks

  • 7:00 PM: Fireside Chat with Gary Wolf

  • 8:00 PM: Meet the Speaker + Book Signing

And don't miss our other monthly tech events. They are great opportunities for builders, founders, and operators to network with each other to share best practices and find new resources to grow your startup the right way. See our full event lineup here.