Announcing our February Dinner Series 🍽️

Intimate, off-the-record dinners with breakout founders

🍽️ Apply now to the Founders You Should Know community — members are the first to know about future dinners and events.

The best way to get to know a founder is through a long, unfiltered conversation, where you can dig into the details that never make it into a pitch deck.

This February, we’re bringing back our private dinner series in San Francisco: intimate, off-the-record dinners where a small group of high-intent engineers and operators sit down with founders of inflecting companies to talk candidly about the real stories behind the build. These dinners are:

• Intimate by Design: We emphasize conversation over presentation. Small groups create space for probing questions, candid discussion, and a deeper understanding of the company’s inner workings.

• For Serious Explorers: These seats are reserved for engineers and operators who are serious about their next move and want to do their due diligence thoughtfully.

• Completely Off the Record: Everything discussed at these dinners stays at the table. These conversations won’t be recorded, shared, or posted anywhere.

The founders you’ll meet

These teams are growing quickly, and early hires will have real ownership and outsized impact.

Emma Qian, founder & CEO of Nova Intelligence (2/11)

​Nova Intelligence leverages multi-agent systems and research-backed models to automate SAP custom code modernization and eliminate technical debt for Fortune 500 companies. Prior to Nova Intelligence, Emma was a researcher at DeepMind.

Best for: engineers excited about solving hard problems others aren’t willing to touch

Request to join here.

Soham Mazumdar, founder & CEO of Wisdom AI (2/17)

Wisdom AI is an agentic data insights platform that transforms complex, siloed enterprise data into an autonomous AI data analyst that provides natural language answers and proactive business insights. Prior to Wisdom AI, Soham was co-founder and chief architect of Rubrik.

Best for: engineers excited to tame messy data at massive scale

Request to join here.

Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, founder & CEO of Blacksmith (2/19)

Blacksmith is a cloud platform that speeds up software testing and deployment (CI/CD) by using high-performance, gaming-grade CPUs to unblock AI-driven development workflows. Prior to Blacksmith, JP was a software engineer at Faire.

Best for: engineers that obsess over performance and infrastructure speed

Request to join here.

Will Yin, founder & CEO of Mandolin (2/23)

Mandolin leverages AI agents to speed up access to life-saving medicine, designed for speciality drug access. Prior to Mandolin, Will was CTO and co-founder of Jupiter, a creator-driven recipe & grocery shopping platform.

Best for: operators and PMs excited about leveraging AI to save lives

Request to join here.