Crypto is out, AI is at the Startup Grind technology conference
Last year’s Startup Grind Global Conference—a celebration of Silicon Valley’s most disruptive—culminated with the boyish face of Sam Bankman-Fried. The now disgraced subgenre of cryptocurrency teleconferences into Redwood City’s Fox Theater for a session on “The Extraordinary Rise of FTX.”
But a year later, Bankman-Fried has been arrested on charges of fraud and money laundering. Crypto values have cratered. Celebrities face lawsuits for promoting non-fungible tokens. And Startup Grind has completely changed the tune.
Taking place Tuesday and Wednesday in Redwood City, the conference draws founders from around the world as well as some of the Bay Area’s top investors. Visitors this year can expect a simple but drastic change: The blockchain is out; artificial intelligence is in.
It’s a strong reversal that shows how hard crypto has fallen, and how quickly buzz in the tech industry can shift. Last year’s conference featured the CEO of the NFT marketplace OpenSea in an opening speech. Prominent Bay Area founders and investors spent session after session pontificating about blockchains, cryptocurrencies and the future of the web. On the first afternoon, a full 30-minute lecture was devoted to the topic of filing taxes for crypto and NFTs.
This year, with a post-blockchain hangover and a tighter economy, crypto is once again on the periphery.
The one blockchain-related program to hit the main stage for the 2023 conference featured Leif Abraham, co-CEO of investment platform Public. He described crypto as just another way for people to enter the investment market, comparing the once-booming market to interest in rare sneakers or meme stocks.
“Every year has its own asset class,” Abraham said. “You had meme stocks and crypto in 2021.” Now, he said, people are getting into government-backed T-bills.
In the conference’s networking tent, Cheeze CEO Simon Hudson answered questions about NFTs in a speech titled “How it started, how it goes.” Cheeze, which originally focused on “camera-centric products on the blockchain”, recently added an AI art feature.
The shift away from crypto is even stronger among the dozens of startups pitching to passersby in the lobby of the Fox Theater, in a Startup Exhibition tent and in gaggles on the street outside the conference. The sign for Ceek, a metaverse-slash-NFT company for celebrities and influencers, was unattended for most of the day as three separate business-to-business AI startups across the street were largely overflowing with interested attendees.
Founders ran artificial intelligence startup for social media mapping, sales workflow automation, digital marketing and meeting management. Oksana Voronova, the co-founder of workflow automation platform Adminix, told SFGATE that her team integrated AI into the product a few months ago. “It needs to be added,” she said.
Startup Grind’s participants hope to capture some of the tech powerhouses’ AI buzz. Fifty-seven of startup incubator Y Combinator’s 272 current companies are working on generative AI. Big venture capitalists, afraid of missing out on the next big thing, have dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into startups with little, if any, revenue.
Those same VCs are taking the conference as a chance to embrace gaming outside of crypto. Venture funding for crypto and blockchain startups in the first quarter was at its lowest level since 2020, The Information reported Wednesday. Sequoia Capital, one of the Valley’s most prominent investors and an early FTX backer, sent partners to Startup Grind for sessions on AI, cloud security and data compliance.
One attendee, Kinshuk Shiv Agrawal, showed up to the conference wearing a jokey, viral “FTX Risk Compliance” shirt he bought just for the occasion. The former eBay employee has gotten a good reaction to the shirt, he said, but unfortunately no one at the conference found it funny enough to offer him a new job. He considered learning blockchain development last year, but opted out — a decision he says he’s grateful for.
Agrawal said if there’s one thing he’s learned about the tech industry living and working in Silicon Valley, “it’s fickle.”
Contact tech reporter Stephen Council safely at [email protected] or at Signal at 628-204-5452.
